LIST OF APPENDICES
3.2 Definitions of talent management
This section will look at the definitions of talent management and what scholars say about them. It is important to look at these definitions because it is vital for this study to track the different definitions of this concept since its origins late in the 1990s.
Talent management is not a new concept and has in fact been called human capital management, employee relationship management and workforce management, among others, over the years by different scholars. It is increasingly becoming complex to identify the precise meaning of “talent management” because of the confusion regarding definitions and terms and the many assumptions made by authors who write about talent management. The terms “talent management”, “talent strategy”, “succession management”, and “human resource planning” are often used interchangeably. For instance, the following statements regarding processes for managing people in organisations are but a few examples:
“!ensure the right person is in the right job at the right time” (Jackson &
Schuler, 1990) cited in (Lewis & Heckman, 2006:140);
“!a deliberate and systematic effort by an organisation to ensure leadership continuity in key positions and encourage individual advancement” (Rothwell, 1994) also cited in (Lewis & Heckman, 2006:140); and,
“!managing the supply, demand, and flow of talent through the human capital engine” (Pascal, 2004) also cited in (Lewis & Heckman, 2006:140),
While each of these terms focuses on managing employees, their apparent similarity obscures the problem that the first definition refers to an outcome, the second to a process, and the third to a specific decision. Thus, the terms in the talent management discourse – which centre on the effective management of employee talent – are not clear and confuse outcomes with processes with decision alternatives.
The complexity in giving the precise meaning of talent management is due to the fact that, there seems to be numerous variations of the definition and terms used by researchers in this field. The definitions appear to be into three distinctive meaning of talent management (Lewis & Heckman, 2006:140).
In the first perspective of talent management definitions; the focus is on the concept of talent pools. Researchers from this group, view talent management as a set of processes designed for the purpose of ensuring that there is ample flow of skilled and competent workers to sustain the needs of the organisation (Cohn, Khurana &
Reeves, 2005; Griffin, 2003; Kessler, 2002). The talent management processes in this instance are carried out with the explicit mission of recruiting, developing and retaining talent in order to build up a large enough pool of talent to fill current and future vacancies. This is often parallel to the processes of succession planning or workforce management; ensuring the progression of people through positions due to organisational demands, production needs, staff turnover, organisational growth and cutbacks.
The second group of definitions centres on talent in general. In this group, employees are categorised according to value (level of talent) to the organisation. Researchers belonging to this group recommend that talented employees should be managed
and differentially rewarded in order to retain their skills (Buckingham and Vosburg, 2001; Chambers, Grandossy & Kao, 2004; Huselid, Beatty & Becker, 2005; Tucker, Kao & Verman, 2005 cited in Lewis & Heckman, 2006). One key and imperative approach of this group of definitions is that it classifies workers by performance level as ‘A’, ‘B’ and ‘C’ players ostensibly to indicate top, competent and bottom performers respectively and it also encourages the development of an ‘A’ star performer, the retention of ‘B’ players (Chambers, 1998; Chambers et al., 2001), Ulrich, 2004 cited in (Meyer & Botha, 2004:425). The emphasis from this perspective is on attraction and retention of top talent in the organisation and reward is well advocated for here.
In comparison to the A, B, C rankings approach discussed above, rather than simply ranking talent, Zuboff introduces market issues into the decisions to be made with respect to talent. Her “difficult-to-replace” dimension is a labour market factor whereas the “value-added” dimension is a customer-related factor. In agreement with this observation is (Lewis & Heckman, 2006:145) who argue that talent can be categorised as valuable, rare, and hard-to-imitate. This provides a very different way of organising thoughts regarding talent. Suppose, for instance, that an organisation's
“A” players are predominantly in the bottom left quadrant of Figure 3.1 below.
Difficult to replace Low value added
Difficult to replace High value added
Easy to replace Low value added
Easy to replace High value added
Value added
Figure 3.1: Talent classified by difficulty-to-replace and value (adapted from Zuboff, 1988)
This approach appears to be more strategic than the ones reviewed earlier because it is more responsive to the conditions faced by the organisation (an element of the Difficult to replace
apparent in system-level or strategic framework they have failed to outline how this should occur (Jackson & Schuler, 1990 cited in Lewis & Heckman, 2006:144).
Last but not least, the third group of definitions views talent management as a set of HR department practices or functions, such as recruitment, selection, development and performance appraisal (Byham, 2002; Fegley, 2006; Hartley, 2004; Mercer, 2005; SHRM, 2006). Scholars from this standpoint view talent management as a set of integrated HR processes that need to be aligned with organisational strategy in order to ensure that human capital is able to meet organisational targets.
In order to include the organisational outcomes aspect, SHRM (2006:1) defines talent management as “the implementation of integrated systems or strategies designed to increase workplace productivity by developing improved processes for attracting, developing, retaining and utilising people with the essential skills and competencies to meet the current and future business needs”. Meyer & Tuck (2004) come closely to SHRM’s definition because they view talent management as “an active management system used by organisations to identify, capture, utilise, develop, grow and nurture the talent of employees to the benefit of the work team and the organisation at large”.
The two closely related definitions envelop several important aspects of talent management:
• It is an on-going systematic process of organisational practice;
• It must be aligned with organisational strategies;
• The process is focused on retention of skilled people with high potential; and
• It is outcomes-based, as it aims at enabling organisations meet their strategic foundations in the vision, mission and values.
The three groups of talent management definitions advocate the use of various HR processes that are aligned to organisational strategies to be used with the sole purpose of continually improving organisational success. It must be pointed here that the SHRM (2006) and Meyer &Tuck (2004) definitions will be used to form the crux of this dissertation as variables like pay satisfaction, organisational commitment, turnover and intention to turnover, retention will be discussed in the subsequent sub- sections of the literature review.