How the value of star employees changes over a career

Overall, star employees tend to create value in different ways as their careers progress. Early on, they create outsized value through their individual performance. Experienced stars, meanwhile, contribute by helping colleagues succeed, sharing expertise and developing future stars.

In research published in the Journal of Management, Call and his colleagues examined how the relationship between pay and value creation changes over the course of a star employee's career.

"Most of us, especially those who have led other people, can agree there are certain employees who create outsized value," said Call, an associate professor of management at Mays Business School. "To have one of those on your team, they're tremendous. Then you move on to how do we best manage these folks as well as how do we manage their impact on the team?"

To better understand how star employees create value over time, Call and his colleagues examined the relationship between compensation and value creation across different career stages.

Early in their careers, Call said, top performers often generate outsized value before the job market fully recognizes their contributions. Because they haven't yet built the visibility or bargaining power that comes with experience, they frequently create more value than they're compensated for.

As those same employees gain experience, their visibility grows along with their ability to negotiate higher salaries. At the same time, their individual output begins to level off.

Looking only at individual contributions, these employees may appear to be overpaid.

Rather than producing more work themselves, Call said experienced stars create value by helping the people around them perform better—sharing institutional knowledge, mentoring colleagues and developing the next generation of top performers.

"What we found was that older stars have a more positive impact on their firms and their colleagues than younger stars do," Call said.

He compares the shift to accomplished musicians whose later careers become defined not only by their own work but by producing and mentoring other artists.

"If you can look at stars who are in the later parts of their careers as people who can be a catalyst for future stars, I think this type of mentoring becomes really important," Call said.

The findings suggest organizations may need to rethink how they support top performers.

High performers may be viewed as a threat to their peers by consistently outperforming them, Call said. Managers should help star employees recognize this dynamic so they can build trust with colleagues and prove that working with them is an opportunity rather than a threat.

"Helping them to recognize that you do much better when you have peer support becomes really important, especially as these star employees start to get more visibility and often get more responsibility," Call said.

More responsibility often means delegating work and relying on others to help execute ideas, making peer support essential.

"When you want someone to become a star in the long term and maintain that type of productivity, you need to teach them how to play well with others," Call said.

Michael D. Ulrich et al, Pay Premiums and Peer Spillovers: Unpacking the Value Proposition of Employing Stars as They Age, Journal of Management (2023). DOI: 10.1177/01492063231210249

Citation: How the value of star employees changes over a career (2026, August 13) retrieved 13 August 2026 from https://phys.org/news/2026-08-star-employees-career.html

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Reporting from Phys.org contributed to this story.