Just want to add a bit to round this out a bit more. Even if I were a manager for a team and I found out a member of my team was looking for work, why would I stop them? Frankly, I might even consider encouraging them to look. “See if you can find a better opportunity.” As a manager, I would ultimately want the best for them. It’s almost always in my best interest to let them search unless there are very clear and immediate actions I can take to keep them happy long term. Why keep an employee who’s not invested? That can do so much damage to a team, it’s hard to imagine until you experience it. Pay alone is not enough to motivate someone to stay long term. I think this is a common misconception because it’s often given in exit interviews as a cop out to avoid burning bridges. “I left because of pay” is often given as a reason because it’s just such an easy excuse to not really piss anyone off.

Way way more often, the case is either flat out bad management or misalignment of the employee expectations with management and/or organizational vision which is way way harder to quantify so thus, nobody does. In the latter, there are often performance issues anyway.

All that said, I’ve worked for companies and have also seen people fired just for simply “looking.” Usually this is a sign of clear toxicity in the company culture because the management ego was hurt when they found out their employee was disloyal. We all know the company would just kick an employee to the curb at the first sign of trouble so it’s unfair to expect anything else from an employee.