دانلود رایگان ترجمه مقاله فعالان استراتژیک در مورد ارزش مدیریت استعداد چگونه فکر می کنند؟ (نشریه امرالد ۲۰۱۷)

فعالان استراتژیک در مورد ارزش مدیریت استعداد چگونه فکر می کنند؟ حرکت از شیوه های استعداد به سوی شیوه هایی برای استعداد

How do strategic actors think about the value of talent management? Moving from talent practice to the practice of talent

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to examine the perceptions of strategic actors in multinational organisations and to contribute to our understanding of how multinational companies articulate and define talent management and how – or what – they perceive its value to be.

Design/methodology/approach The paper is based on an empirical research study in which data were collected through 50 in-depth interviews across five multinational companies, conducted at a regional level across ten countries. Participants in the study were strategic actors representing two groups of managers/leaders (HR and talent management system designers and business leaders who are directly involved in the implementation of talent management).

Findings The absence of a formal talent management definition led to the emergence of different views and interpretations of what it is. It was viewed as a bundle, or set, of management ideologies manifested in all HR-related practices across four key areas: hiring the right talent, performance management, succession planning and development and retention. Performance management acted as the cornerstone. Talent management strategies displayed little participation for both system designers and implementers and distinct patterns of mystification, technologization and concretisation. The language of value was uncommonly used but provoked different ways of thinking about the role and meaning of talent management.

Practical implications The strategic actors in the talent system continue to see talent management in narrow functional and HR process terms. However, by bundling these HR functions and processes together, it is evident that they can be encouraged to recast their activity in a broader strategic narrative. Borrowing the notions and theories of value and value creation, and investigating talent management through this lens, should help to surface interesting insights into how talent management might be defined in practice, and how the language of value may in future be used to understand what talent management really is.

Originality/value The global study underpinning this paper attempts to deconstruct the understanding that strategic actors have about talent management from an empirical base. It contributes to the conceptual development of the talent management discourse by revealing the logics being pursued and address the definitional problem currently evidenced in the literature. It also provides direction for future research.

۱ Introduction

Academics argue that the field of talent management has moved out of its infancy state into a relatively more mature state. On the back of a series of influential practitioner publications (Michaels et al., 2001; Creelman, 2004; Heinen and O’Neill, 2004; Ashton and Morton, 2005; Tucker et al., 2005), academic research subsequently developed both rapidly and broadly after 2008, guided by a series of academic special issues (Scullion et al., 2010; McDonnell et al., 2011, 2012; Al Ariss et al., 2014). There has also been a widening range of theoretical research, stemming from traditions as various as human capital management (Lepak and Snell, 1999; Wright and McMahan., 2011), strategic human resource management (Lado and Wilson, 1994; Becker and Huselid, 2006; Wright et al., 1994), the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm (Barney, 1991; Barney and Wright, 1998; Bowman and Ambrosini, 2000), marketing perspectives such as brand equity and signalling theory (Boudreau and Ramstad, 2005), supply chain management (Cappelli, 2008), and more recently, social exchange theory (Wang-Cowham, 2011), resource dependency theory (Garavan et al., 2012), institutional theory (Iles et al., 2010; Martin et al., 2011) and learning theory (Yoon and Lim, 2010; Oltra and Vivas-López, 2013). There has been a process of rapid contextualisation taking place, understanding important variations in practice or philosophy. These contributions have all shaped the field, but they have also led to much debate about the assumptions and philosophies defining “talent” and “talent management”, and underpinning its practice (Collings and Mellahi, 2009; Meyers et al., 2013; Gallardo-Gallardo et al., 2013; Dries, 2013). The recent burst of academic interest has led to the development of many – one might argue over-sophisticated – claims about and critiques of talent management. We are at risk of creating a disconnect between our academic analysis and the field of practice. Let us understand the mindset of the actors involved before we attempt to guide them to what we might see as better courses of action.

In a recent systematic review of studies in leading journals (capturing studies until 2013), McDonnell et al. (2017, p. 90) concluded that the field has evolved “at the intersection of HRM, strategy, international business and other related fields” with research conducted in two main contexts: the management of high performers and high potentials, and the identification of strategic positions and talent management systems. Although most papers draw, to some extent, on primary research, there remains a need for greater clarity around the conceptual boundaries of talent management, and more comprehensive and nuanced methodological approaches. Despite 60 per cent of studies having some empirical component, 56 per cent of these were survey based, much with convenience samples and limited information on response rates, and 18 per cent were based on single case studies, drawn from widely different geographies. Less than 30 per cent had any theoretical framing, and in many instances such framing was superficial. In order to move the field forward, McDonnell et al. (2017) concluded an overriding need was that “[…] talent management should be concerned with understanding where value is added in organisations by human capital” (p. 117). The research question examined in the study is:

RQ1. How does talent management add value to organisations, as perceived by strategic actors in multinational organisations?

To address this question, we argue that there is a need to understand how organisations define talent management and to explore the perceptions of strategic actors of talent management. We do this by drawing upon interviews with 50 strategic actors across five MNEs. At the managerial level, strategic actors may be defined as those managers who have the requirement to reason and act strategically, who are able to formulate goals that they wish to attain and to make a hierarchy among those goals, and who are actually performing in the role actively. They differ from managers who are pragmatic re-actors (those who may execute strategy, but have no agency to shape the strategy or how it is enacted), or those who represent a passive pole or position (those individuals who have the capacity to use their voice or resources to argue a position, but who practice a passive role). In relation to talent management, we identify and interview two different types of strategic actors that both perceive degrees of agency:

(۱) talent system designers; and

(۲) talent system implementers.

We adopt a strategy-as-practice (SAS) perspective. We argue that before we attempt to develop broader perspectives on how talent management may or may not add value to organisations, we need to understand the realities and views of the key actors involved. It is important that before we impose any theories or models of value on talent management, or enter what might just be self-interesting debates, we must first understand how these actors understand the phenomenon they are tasked with managing, and ideally see if we can differentiate between those views that are primary in their logics, self-generated and explanatory of their practice, and those deeper constructs that can perhaps be entertained and surfaced, and therefore have the potential to move them beyond their primary practice. From a SAS perspective (Whittington, 2006; Jarzabkowski et al., 2007; Vaara and Whittington, 2012; Björkman et al., 2014; Dick and Collings, 2016), we need to understand the views not only of these key practitioners (or strategic actors as we term them) but also the flows and streams of activities of individuals and groups involved in their talent work, and the practices involved (the tools processes, procedures and norms that are adapted and combined to construct and deliver their strategy). Paraphrasing Björkman et al. (2014), who introduced the notion of “HRM-as-practice”, mirroring the “strategy-as-practice” (SAP) movement in the strategy field, as a conceptual lens and research shift, from the traditional focus on either HRM practices or the HR function to a more comprehensive approach incorporating the practices, practitioners and praxis of HRM (a shift from “HRM practices” to the “practice of HRM”) we need to move from understanding talent practices, to understanding the practice of talent management.

It is not our intention to examine the micro-processes through which system designers and implementers work, but it is important to interview both communities because non-senior managers or senior managers tasked with executing a pre-formed strategy can sometimes have a better understanding of whether strategies are realistic or not, and their interpretations can be an important source of organisational learning. However, we shall comment on the interpretations both communities make. However, the study is therefore designed to capture the potentially complex, or indeed simplified, views and meanings that these strategic actors assign to talent management, how these actors define talent management (what does it mean to them in the absence of a formal definition), and how they perceive the value of talent management in its totality. We are in essence examining talent management through the meanings that actors see as influencing the development of their practice, and the contextual rationales they draw upon in attributing such meaning. We argue that only once we have such understanding should we attempt to examine the value of talent management and understand how it may add value to organisations, thereby helping to resolve the definitional debates around talent management.