Talent Management Through the Management Fashion Lens

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Volume Title

School of Business | Master's thesis

Date

2016

Major/Subject

Mcode

Degree programme

Management and International Business (MIB)

Language

en

Pages

135

Series

Abstract

In the last two decades, Talent Management(TM) has been regarded as a crucial issue among managers, consultants and academics because it is considered a key component of the HR function and it promises to enhance organizational performance. The recent proliferation of TM-related publications has led to a general belief that TM is a well-defined area of practice supported by an extensive research and a core set of principles. However, different literature reviews and studies have shown a lack of clarity with regards to the definition, scope, empirical evidence, and overall goals leading some scholars to suggest that TM is just another management fashion (e.g. “old wines in new bottles”). In general, management fashions are transitory beliefs claiming that pursuing particular management techniques and practices will improve the performance of an organization. The importance of this phenomenon is that it often creates a bandwagon effect, leading companies to adopt practices with no assurance of their effectiveness. Therefore, this thesis aims to get a better understanding of TM by analyzing it through the management fashion lens. This thesis employed an innovative research design that included data collected from blog posts of a well-established online HR community in the UK. The selection of the blog posts was based on predefined key words and their period of publication (2009-2014), which lead to the collection of 1236 blog posts. With regards to the analysis, the data from each of the years was first analyzed using Leximancer software, which provides both in-depth qualitative and quantitative insights into the data. Then, a comparative analysis across the years was done in order to identify evolving patterns and changes related to definitions, solutions, practices and implementation of talent management. The empirical findings seem to generally support the assertion that talent management displays management fashion features such as vague rhetoric, no empirical evidence, re-branding (e.g. “old wine in new bottles”) and lack of clarity regarding its definition. Despite of the management fashion features displayed by TM, the discussions lead to the assumption that the TM bandwagon effect continues to grow since organizations continue to consider vital the implementation of TM for improving organizational performance. In terms of TM implementation, this study shows that there is no universal answer to what approach is the best or the most recommended. From the discussion, it seems that each organization determines the implementation of TM based on the organization’s mission, culture, goals, and business context. Therefore, a better understanding of the different ways to implement TM will potentially help organizations to implement TM accordingly to their organization’s context.

Description

Thesis advisor

Beletskiy , Anton
Mäkelä, Kristiina

Keywords

talent management, talent, management fashions, Leximancer

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