Chris Gash/theispot.com
A recent battle for AI talent illustrates how difficult it is for companies to retain key employees. In 2025, OpenAI’s stock-based compensation averaged roughly $1.5 million per employee — unprecedented for a pre-IPO company — yet OpenAI still experienced high-profile defections. Rivals such as Meta were reportedly extending offers in the hundreds of millions of dollars for top AI talent, prompting OpenAI to issue multimillion-dollar one-time retention bonuses and to relax equity vesting requirements twice in a single year. The result was an escalating bidding war with no clear ceiling and no guarantee of success.
That dynamic has not ceased. Rather, the competition for talent has intensified and expanded, with AI companies recruiting not only elite researchers but also senior executives and business leaders from across the technology sector.
The AI talent wars are an extreme case, but they illustrate a broader problem across industries: The most valuable employees are also the most mobile. In sectors such as artificial intelligence and consulting, intense competition reflects rapid technological change that makes certain capabilities suddenly scarce. In health care and skilled trades, retention pressures stem from long-standing workforce shortages. Construction companies are facing a growing labor gap driven in part by retirements, even as demand is rising with the expansion of large-scale infrastructure and data center projects. Across all of these contexts, when an employee leaves, their employer loses embedded knowledge, client trust, and innovation capacity along with them.
Yet most companies respond to this challenge in a tactical, episodic fashion: a counteroffer here, a culture initiative there, or a noncompete added to a contract. These one-off measures address symptoms rather than causes, and, as OpenAI’s experience shows, pay-based competition alone can trap companies in a race they cannot win.
Traditional approaches to understanding the problem focus on factors that make employees move, but what is missing is a systematic framework for understanding why they stay.1 Our recent article in the Journal of Management investigates the factors that limit employee mobility away from an employer — what we call employee mobility barriers.2 Drawing on research from multiple disciplines, we have synthesized these barriers into a practical architecture that managers can use to retain talent more deliberately — and compete for new hires more effectively — in today’s talent wars.
Understanding Employee Mobility Barriers
Whenever an employee considers leaving, they navigate a set of frictions that make moving harder and staying more attractive. These barriers range from the concrete — noncompete agreements, unvested stock, pension accrual — to the more intangible, such as the satisfaction of meaningful work, the promise of career advancement, and social ties that make teamwork productive and fulfilling. Together, such forces shape whether a move feels possible and worthwhile or not worth the disruption.
Barriers differ along two dimensions: level and control. Some barriers operate at the individual level, such as an employee’s career stage, personal preferences, or priorities. Others stem from organizational systems and practices, including social ties, employment contracts, or career development systems. Still others are rooted in broader societal factors, such as visa restrictions or labor market conditions.
Control is the degree to which employers can influence the mobility barrier and employee experiences. Employers can directly shape factors such as compensation, job design, and employment contracts, but they have less influence over others. For instance, employee attributes such as age or personality can be “shaped” only at the point of selection, while social ties and networks emerge over time and are difficult for a company to directly engineer. Other barriers, such as location preferences, regional labor-market conditions, or visa and licensing requirements, are largely outside an employer’s control.
Perceptions also play an important role in how mobility barriers function. How employees interpret such barriers they face and the opportunities available to them elsewhere can influence their decision to stay or leave. For example, an employee who believes that they have better career development opportunities with their current employer than with a competitor may choose to stay, regardless of whether that belief is accurate.
Employee Mobility Barriers in Practice
In practice, employee mobility barriers and companies’ effectiveness at retaining talent can vary across industries, companies, roles, and individuals. What keeps an AI engineer from moving may differ from what retains an industrial salesperson or a veteran nurse. Stock options are a powerful retention mechanism in the tech industry but largely irrelevant in the public sector or education. An entry-level employee building their initial professional network and reputation may experience very different barriers than a more s
