Strategic Talent Management

 

The business environment since the early 1990s has gone through a significant expansion with falling trade barriers and the globalization of business. For many companies, growth has come through global expansion, particularly into China and India. This expansion has put a premium on having the global talent needed to support these initiatives (McCall &Hollenbeck, 2002; Sloan, Hazucha, &Van Katwyk, 2003) and has provided great visibility to successful global leaders (Kets DeVries & Florent - Treacy, 1999). This has resulted in greater competition for the best talent (Michaels et al., 2001). The growing worldwide demand for talent, along with the shrinking availability of exceptional talent, has made talent acquisition, development, and retention a major strategic challenge in many companies (Silzer and Dowell 2010).

 

Effective talent management is not just about attracting, developing, and retaining the best talent; it is about organizing and managing people so that they perform in ways that lead to excellent organizational performance (Lawler, 2008).

 

Strategic talent management offers a distinct approach to the management of human resources and a response to the changes occurring in a turbulent operating environment, a means of improving firm performance (Joyce & Slocum, 2012), reducing employee turnover (Ballinger, Craig, Cross, & Gray, 2011), and achieving sustainable competitive advantage (Chatman, O'Reilly, & Chang, 2005; Iles, Preece, & Chuai, 2010).

 

Figure 1: Show the stages of Talent Management starting from Programmatic to Cultural aspects.

Source: Based on Gubman & Green (2007).

 

These design features are the fundamental features that need to be incorporated in any performance management system in organizations that wish to achieve competitive advantage through their talent: (1) The organization conducts appraisals top-to-bottom; (2) Appraisal is itself evaluated for effectiveness; (3) Goals are set in advance; (4) Frequency fits rate of change; (5) How goals are accomplished matters; (6) Appraisee input is part of the process; (7) Objective performance measures are used; (8) Measures are strategic; (9) Ratings are meaningful; (10) Pay for performance discussions and development discussions are separate; (11) The organization has (or is building) a skills/competency database, (12) Ongoing performance feedback is the norm (Lawler, 2008).


A review of the relevant multi-disciplinary literature indicates that effective talent management practices are consistently associated with the following outcomes, across a wide range of employee groups and organizational settings (Fox, Bunton and Dandar, 2011).

  • Higher levels of employee engagement and retention (Allen, Bryant and Vardaman 2010). These are important intermediate outcomes that research has linked to positive organizational performance, defined by productivity or financial measures (Leggat, Bartram, Casimir and Stanton, 2010).

  • Positive individual-level performance of faculty and staff, including job performance and organizational citizenship behaviors (outcomes that contribute to improved organizational performance) (Bland et al. 2005). Robust talent management practices in recruitment, employee development and morale-building can directly improve individual performance.

  • Positive organizational-level performance, including quality of patient care, hospital mortality rates, customer service quality, productivity, and various measures of financial performance (West et al. 2006). The value and impact of talent management have also been recognized in practitioner circles. Both McKinsey and the Conference Board consider talent management to be a critical component of an organization’s business strategy (Cappelli 2009).


A failure in one part of the talent effort is a failure for the strategy, and everyone should have some responsibility to correct it. In some ways, the strategy (business or talent) defines the team rather than the specific HR system or program. These systems and processes are strategically driven and fully integrated (Silzer and Dowell 2010).


 

List of References

Ahammad, M.F., Glaister, K.W., Sarala, R.M. and Glaister, A.J., 2018. Strategic talent management in emerging markets. Thunderbird International Business Review, 60(1), pp.5-8.

 

Allen DG, Bryant PC, Vardaman JM. Retaining talent: replacing misconceptions with evidence-based strategies. Academy of Management Perspectives. 2010;24(2):48-62.

 

Ballinger, G., Craig, E., Cross, R., & Gray, P. (2011). A stitch in time saves nine: Leveraging networks to reduce the costs of turnover. California Management Review, 53(4), 111–133.

 

Bland CJ, Center BA, Finstad DA, Risbey KR, Staples JG. A theoretical, practical, predictive model of faculty and department research productivity. Academic Medicine. March 2005;80(3):225-37.

 

Cappelli P. “Are we mismanaging our top talent?” Human Resource Executive Online. 2009.

 

Chatman, J., O'Reilly, C., & Chang, V. (2005). Cisco Systems: Developing a human capital strategy. California Management Review, 47, 137–167.

 

Fox, S., Bunton, S.A. and Dandar, V., 2011. The case for strategic talent management in academic medicine.

 

Gubman, E. L., &Green, S. (2007). The four stages of talent management. San Francisco: Executive Networks

 

Joyce, W., & Slocum, J. (2012). Top management talent, strategic capabilities, and firm performance. Organizational Dynamics, 41, 183–193.

 

Lawler, E.E., 2008. Strategic talent management: Lessons from the corporate world. Strategic Management of Human Capital, 5, pp.1-35.

 

Leggat S, Bartram T, Casimir G, Stanton P. Nurse perceptions of the quality of patient care: confirming the importance of empowerment and job satisfaction. Health Care Management Review, 2010;35(4):355- 64.

 

McCall Jr., M. W., &Hollenbeck, G. P. (2002). The lessons of international experience: Developing global executives. Boston: Harvard Business School Press.

 

Silzer, R. and Dowell, B.E., 2010. Strategic talent management matters. Strategy-driven talent management: A leadership imperative, pp.3-72.

 

Sloan, E. B., Hazucha, J. F., &Van Katwyk, P. T. (2003). Strategic management of global leadership talent. Advances in Global Leadership, 3, 235 – 274.

 

West MA, Guthrie JP, Dawson JF, Borrill CS, Carter M. Reducing patient mortality in hospitals: the role of human resource management. Journal of Organizational Behavior. 2006;27(7):983-1002

Comments

  1. MenupaSeptember 7, 2021 at 9:45 AM

    Agreed with you. 'Deciding what business the company will be in and forming a strategic vision of where the organization needs to be headed – in effect, infusing the organization with a sense of purpose, providing long-term direction, and establishing a clear mission to be accomplished,' Thompson and Strickland (1996: 3) identify as the key strategic management activity.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Khalid HumayuniSeptember 9, 2021 at 2:33 PM

      Yes Menupa. This relatively recent emphasis on talent management represents a paradigm shift from more traditional human resource related sources of competitive advantage literature such as those that focus on organizational elites, including upper-echelon literature (Hambrick & Mason, 1984; Miller, Burke, & Glick, 1998), and strategic human resource management (SHRM) (Huselid, Jackson, & Schuler, 1997; Schuler, 1989; Wright & McMahon, 1992) towards the management of talent specifically suited to today's dynamic competitive environment.

      Delete
  2. Hemachandra KrishnachandraahSeptember 8, 2021 at 8:18 AM

    Yes, furthermore, effective talent management systems don’t just acquire and introduce highly qualified individuals to the organization, they ensure that the fit is right between employee and employer. They also monitor and manage an individual’s relationship with the organization effectively for as long as it is in the best interest of the organization to have the individual as an employee (Lawler, 2008).

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    Replies
    1. Khalid HumayuniSeptember 9, 2021 at 2:35 PM

      Right. Organizations such as Zurich systematically identify future business needs in terms of knowledge, skills and capabilities that will be required in the future but are not currently available in house and recruit on this basis. Indeed, Stahl et al.'s (2007) study of global talent management confirmed that the high performing organizations they studied followed a talent pool strategy— recruiting the best people and then finding positions for them.

      Delete
  3. Chathuri CreasySeptember 8, 2021 at 10:12 AM

    Agreed. Further to support your theory presentation (Cappelli, 2008).

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Khalid HumayuniSeptember 9, 2021 at 2:37 PM

      Some strategic HRM (SHRM) scholars (c.f. Lepak & Snell, 1999), adopt a bottom up focus in their theory development emphasizing the idea that employees can contribute to the firm's strategic objective simply because of their value and uniqueness (Becker & Huselid 2006).

      Delete
  4. GajendranSeptember 9, 2021 at 1:20 PM

    Agree with you, Further Everything done to recruit, retain, develop, reward and make people perform forms a part of talent management as well as strategic workforce planning. A talent-management strategy needs to link to business strategy to make sense (Vijay kumar Thota 2013)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Khalid HumayuniSeptember 9, 2021 at 2:43 PM

      Many times CEOs (chief executive officers) get all the credit or all the blame, but in our experience, it is the quality of talent throughout the organization that ultimately leads to the creation and effective execution of successful strategy. Gary Hamel argues that “people are all there is to an organization ”(cited in Sears, 2003). Collins (2001) suggests that having the right people comes before having the right strategies.

      Delete
  5. Khalid HumayuniSeptember 9, 2021 at 2:29 PM

    Yes Nimna. Indeed, Stahl et al.'s (2007) study of global talent management confirmed that the high performing organizations they studied followed a talent pool strategy— recruiting the best people and then finding positions for them.

    ReplyDelete
  6. Nilmini AssaddumaSeptember 9, 2021 at 5:31 PM

    Agreed. Successful organizations of the future will not be those with the most advanced technology or the most liquid capital. They will be those that are systematically managing and developing talent to gain and sustain competitive advantage. (William J. Rothwell, John Wiley & Sons, 2012)

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Khalid HumayuniSeptember 9, 2021 at 8:48 PM

      Yes. David G. Collings (2014) proposes the ability, motivation, opportunity framework as a very useful frame to consider the linkage between talent management and organization success. Recognizing that simply loading an organization with talent employees is a poor strategy, this approach is premised on the alignment of the highest-performing and highest-potential employees with those roles that have the greatest potential for differential performance.

      Delete

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