An employee asks to transfer to another department and their line manager objects — do we go with the employee or the manager?

Start with what these studies do not show. None of the three examines a refused transfer. There is no experiment in which one group of employees is denied an internal move and another is not. What the evidence establishes is the mechanism underneath the decision — how people respond when they judge that their route forward inside the organisation has narrowed — and the part that judgement plays in an employee's stated intention to leave.

Perceived career growth tracks intention to leave, and it does so in the Gulf. A survey of employees across 38 ministries in the Sultanate of Oman (Al Balushi and colleagues, 2022, PLOS ONE) analysed 329 valid responses by structural equation modelling. It set out to measure whether career growth influences turnover intention, and whether organisational commitment carries that relationship. Its framing of the problem is worth quoting for its context alone: a public sector "currently facing high turnover rates and losing key skilled talent pool." This is not evidence imported from another labour market and hoped to transfer.

The mechanism repeats in an unrelated industry and continent. A survey of 327 frontline employees across twenty-two 5-star hotels in Nigeria (Ohunakin and colleagues, 2018, Business: Theory and Practice) also used structural equation modelling. Every dimension of career growth it measured interacted inversely with turnover intention — and its four dimensions are unusually concrete for this literature: career goal progress, professional ability development, promotion speed, and remuneration growth. Promotion speed is the one that matters here. It is a measure of how quickly someone believes they are moving, which is exactly the perception a refused transfer alters.

And the supervisor is not a bystander in this. A study of 433 employees across several organisations in Korea (Jun, Hu and Sun, 2023, Frontiers in Psychology) tested how a supervisor's behaviour reaches employee turnover intention. Within the specific relationship it tested, perceived supervisor support fully mediated the effect: in its model the supervisor's conduct was the channel the effect travelled through, rather than one contributor among several. That is a finding about that model, not a measure of how much of any employee's decision a manager accounts for.

Put those together and the shape of the risk is legible. The manager is not a neutral party: their behaviour can materially shape how the employee interprets their future within the organisation.

The evidence is correlational, and it is thinner than it looks. All three studies are cross-sectional and self-reported. Employees rated their own career growth, their own supervisor, and their own intention to leave, at one point in time. That design cannot separate cause from effect: a person already intending to leave may rate their career prospects and their manager more harshly, and the data would look identical. Two of the three also gathered every variable from the same respondents at the same moment, which inflates the relationships between them.

Intention to leave is not leaving. All three measure turnover intention. The gap between intending to leave and resigning is wide, and it varies with the labour market, visa status, notice periods and family circumstances — all of which bear heavily in the Gulf and none of which these studies hold constant.

The contexts are not yours. Omani ministries, Korean firms, Nigerian hotels. The consistency across three unrelated settings is genuinely reassuring, and it is the best argument the evidence makes. But none of them is a GCC private-sector organisation deciding whether to release someone from a team.

And the manager may simply be right. Nothing here says a transfer should be granted. An employee can want a move that is bad for them, badly timed, or into a role they will not hold. The evidence does not adjudicate the transfer. It prices the refusal.

The question is framed wrongly, and the framing is what causes the damage.

Backing the manager is not the same as keeping the employee. What the manager can veto is the transfer. What he cannot veto is the employee's conclusion about whether this organisation has a route forward for them. Refusing the move may weaken the employee's perception of future career opportunities and increase their intention to leave. The evidence does not establish whether they will actually resign.

The manager is also behaving rationally, and treating him as the villain will not fix it. He is measured on his team's delivery, not on where his people are in three years. Releasing a strong performer costs him immediately and pays him nothing. If your managers systematically block internal moves, that is an incentive design telling them to, and overruling one manager on one case leaves the design untouched.

So the honest answer to the question as asked: decide the transfer on its merits, but stop treating the refusal as cost-free. It carries a cost, the evidence gives you a reasonable idea of its shape, and if that cost does land it lands later and elsewhere — in a departure recorded as being about pay or a competitor.

The actions below are Peoplense's practical interpretation of the evidence. They were not tested as interventions in the three studies.

Separate the two decisions before you make either. Is this transfer good for the organisation? And is this person's route forward credible? The manager's objection answers the first. It has no bearing on the second, and the second is what drives the departure risk.

Ask the manager what would make it possible, not whether it is possible. A notice period, a handover, a backfill, a date. "No" is rarely the real answer; "not until March" usually is, and it is a different answer with a different cost.

If you refuse, tell the person what changes and when. The measured driver is perceived career growth and promotion speed — a refusal with a date attached is a different signal from a refusal without one. If you cannot attach a date, you have learned something about whether this person should stay.

Then look at whether your managers are rewarded for letting people go. If no part of how they are measured reflects developing people out of their team, you will keep having this argument, one case at a time, and losing the people underneath it.

One of the three studies is Gulf evidence — Omani public sector, 38 ministries, 329 employees — and it was framed around a problem the region will recognise: high turnover and the loss of skilled staff from public bodies. That makes the mechanism something measured here, not imported.

Three regional factors sharpen it. The public sector is a large employer across the GCC, and internal mobility inside government bodies is more procedural and slower than in private firms, which raises how much a refused move signals. Nationalisation programmes mean many organisations are simultaneously trying to place, retain and develop national employees — and a blocked internal transfer works directly against retention targets the same organisation is being held to. And in a market where a significant share of the workforce is on employer-tied residency, the gap between intending to leave and leaving is wider than these studies assume, which may delay the resignation without preventing it.

⚠️ A regional target is not evidence. That nationalisation targets exist does not demonstrate that granting internal transfers improves retention of national employees. We have found no study testing that. It is a reasonable inference from the mechanism, and it is stated here as an inference.

All three sources below are open-access under CC BY 4.0, verified per article against the publisher record.

1. Al Balushi, A. K., Thumiki, V. R. R., Nawaz, N., Jurcic, A., & Gajenderan, V. (2022). Role of organizational commitment in career growth and turnover intention in public sector of Oman. PLOS ONE, 17(5), e0265535. CC BY 4.0.
2. Jun, K., Hu, Z., & Sun, Y. (2023). Impact of authentic leadership on employee turnover intention: Perceived supervisor support as mediator and organizational identification as moderator. Frontiers in Psychology, 14, 1009639. CC BY 4.0.
3. Ohunakin, F., Adeniji, A., & Oludayo, O. (2018). Perception of frontline employees towards career growth opportunities: Implications on turnover intention. Business: Theory and Practice, 19, 278–287. CC BY 4.0.

Why three and not more. Four further sources were identified and licence-verified for this page and could not be included: MDPI, SAGE and Virtus Interpress each refused the request with an HTTP 403, and BMC returned a stub. All four are CC BY and legally reusable — the barrier was access, not rights. They can be added by hand if this page is taken further.