Talent Management: An Alternative Perspective

Abstract

Talent management has gained wide popularity among the practitioner community because it has been identified by them and the consultants as a source of producing necessary capability differentials to achieve sustainable competitive advantage. The majority of organizations practice the ‘exclusive’ approach to talent management, where organizations identify a limited percentage as talented employees resulting in dissatisfaction among the majority of employees. This, is contrary to the expectations of the main concept of talent management, and it has negatively influenced firms’ aim of gaining competitive advantage. As such the purpose of this study is to look at ‘How viable is talent management as a management practice in generating results for organizations in the long run?’ The findings of this study would enlighten the managers about the unnoticed consequences of adopting the practice of talent management from a ‘short term shareholder approach’ ,rather than considering the wider interests of the other stakeholders as proposed in the stakeholder theory. In addition, it will also become an eye opener for the managers to not only focus on the interests of the managers in adopting business practices, but also that they need to have a balanced look at performance considering multiple stakeholders of all other activities of the business. Accordingly, this concern of considering the interests of multiple stakeholders, proposed based on the stakeholder theory of this study, is a new perspective than what had been considered by managers of organizations in adopting practices such as talent management. Further, it addresses the issue of limited empirical studies in the field of talent management, and also takes a novel perspective than the existing literature by overcoming the limitations of current talent management literature.