Toward Mature Talent Management: Beyond Shareholder Value

Toward Mature Talent Management: Beyond Shareholder Value

Talent management has become one of the most prevalent topics in the field of people management and development for practitioners and academics alike. However, while managers do appear to appreciate the importance of talent management, they often fail to manage it effectively, and the linkages between talent management and organizational performance remain unclear. In this invited feature article, David Collings, Professor of Human Resource Management in DCU Business School, argues that the failure to effectively manage and develop talent can be traced, in part, to a narrow conceptualization of performance in much thinking on talent management. At an organizational level, this means that performance is generally considered solely in terms of shareholder returns while ignoring other stakeholders. This translates into HR systems that fail to effectively align individuals and organizations in the generation of value. This article foregrounds employees as stakeholders and argues that organizations that are defined by a sense of purpose and that prioritize employees as stakeholders generally have higher levels of alignment between organizational and employee goals with more highly motivated employees and ultimately more sustainable performance. Some implications for research on talent management are developed.

This Journal Article has been published in Human Resource Development Quarterly (HRDQ) , the first scholarly journal focused directly on the evolving field of human resource development (HRD). It provides a central focus for research on human resource development issues as well as the means for disseminating such research. HRDQ recognizes the interdisciplinary nature of the HRD field and brings together relevant research from the related fields, such as economics, education, management, sociology, and psychology. It provides an important link in the application of theory and research to HRD practice. HRDQ publishes scholarly work that addresses the theoretical foundations of HRD, HRD research, and evaluation of HRD interventions and contexts.

The full article can be found in full here.

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