Talent Management – Unscrambled

The talent management literature is rife with ambiguous definitions and misdefinitions, stemming in part from overlap and unclear boundaries between talent management and other related literatures in human resource management (HRM). The main purpose of this paper is to identify and define the key features of talent and talent management in order to clarify the field. In this paper, we organize talent and talent management into two broad categories – pivotal positions and pivotal people. Drawing on the literature in talent management, we develop a taxonomy of both categories. Pivotal positions can be subcategorized into “A- positions”, positions that are difficult to fill, or leadership positions, while pivotal people can be subcategorized into those who exhibit high performance, show signs of high potential, or a combination of both. We introduce a series of propositions that clarify what talent management is, and what it is not, and discuss how this definitional clarification can help advance the study o...