Talent management and innovation management: Review of the literature and challenges for future research

Abstract

Talent management (TM) has turned out to be one of fastest-growing areas of academic work in the fields of international strategy (Morris, Snell & Björkman, 2016), organization (Collings, Scullion & Vaiman, 2015) and entrepreneurship (Liu & Almor, 2016; Wang & Liu, 2016) over recent decades. Since McKinsey consultants coined the term the ‘war for talent’ (Axelrod, Handfield-Jones & Welsh, 2001; Chambers et al., 1998), a growing number of practitioners and scholars have devoted their attention to the concept and stressed the importance of talent in sparking firms’ success (or their failure) (Bethke-Langenegger, Mahler & Staffelbach, 2011). Currently, debate on TM is organized around three distinct strains of thought (Lewis & Heckman, 2006). The first refers to TM as a collection of typically human resource management department practices (Byham, 2009; Chuai, Preece & Iles, 2008). The second considers TM as synonymous with management and valorization of talent pools (Bartlett & Ghoshal, 2002). The third refers generically to the management of talented employees (Michaels, Axelrod & Handfield-Jones, 2001). Despite its growing popularity, the research on TM suffers from several shortcomings that limit its theoretical and practical contribution. Even though several reviews have aimed at clarifying the scope of the concept (Collings & Mellahi, 2009; Collings et al., 2015; Tarique & Schuler, 2010) and a number of special issues have been published in top-tier journals, such as Journal of World Business (2014) and International Journal of Human Resource Management (2017), TM still fails to be linked systematically to researched-based findings as well as failing to have strong practical guidelines (Gallardo-Gallardo et al., 2015). We hold that in order to overcome these limits and enrich the debate on TM, it would be important to borrow from received findings of innovation literature and reinforce the integration especially with studies