Talent management and organisational justice: employee reactions to high potential identification

• Author: Roland Pepermans,Joeri Hofmans,Nicky Dries,Jolyn Gelens
• Published date: 01 April 2014
• Date: 01 April 2014
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/1748-8583.12029

Talent management and organisational justice:

employee reactions to high potential identification

Jolyn Gelens, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, KU Leuven

Joeri Hofmans, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Nicky Dries, KU Leuven

Roland Pepermans, Vrije Universiteit Brussel

Human Resource Management Journal, Vol 24, no 2, 2014, pages 159–175

We examined how perceived distributive and procedural justice affected the relationship between an

employee’s identification as a high potential (drawn from archival data), job satisfaction and work effort.

A questionnaire was distributed within one large company among employees who were and employees

who were not identified as a high potential (n= 203). The results indicated that perceptions of

distributive justice were significantly higher for employees identified as a high potential. Moreover,

perceived distributive justice fully mediated the relationship between an employee’s identification and his

or her level of job satisfaction. The results also revealed that perceptions of procedural justice moderated

the relationship between perceived distributive justice and work effort. Theoretical and practical

consequences of these findings are discussed.

Contact: Jolyn Gelens, Work and Organizational Psychology, Faculty of Psychology and

Educational Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Brussel, Pleinlaan 2, 1050 Brussels, Belgium. Email:

jolyn.gelens@vub.ac.be

INTRODUCTION

Talent management has emerged as the solution to current challenges in HR and as the

key to organisational efficiency (Collings and Mellahi, 2009), even in non-industrial

settings (van den Brink et al., 2013). In line with this reasoning, the few studies that

have tested the impact of talent management have mainly focused on outcomes at the macro

level (Bethke-Langenegger et al., 2011). Yet talent management practices not only affect

macro-outcomes, but also more proximal ones, such as employee attitudes and behaviours. This

is because they primarily target the highly valuable and unique employees (i.e. high potentials)

as they are assumed to generate the greatest return on investment (Lepak and Snell, 1999). The

result is that talent management positively affects the reactions of this selective group of high

potentials (Huselid and Becker, 2011), while there may be no or even a negative impact among

the people who are excluded from the talent management practices (i.e. non-high potentials).

Together, these conflicting effects at the employee level may even cause talent management to

have a negative overall effect (Marescaux et al., 2013). For this reason, several researchers

(Becker et al., 2009; Gelens et al., 2013) have suggested that studying the effects of talent

management at the micro level is necessary.

In the present article, we will contribute to the research on talent management by examining

the influence of high potential identification on job satisfaction and work effort. Moreover, to

understand why talent management practices may have different effects on high potentials and

non-high potentials, we will explore the psychological processes that are involved in shaping

these employee reactions. As implemented talent management practices (i.e. identification as a

high potential or not) may markedly differ from how these practices are perceived by

bs_bs_banner

doi: 10.1111/1748-8583.12029

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 24 NO 2, 2014 159

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Please cite this article in press as: Gelens, J., Hofmans, J., Dries, N. and Pepermans, R. (2014) ‘Talent management and organisational justice:

employee reactions to high potential identification’. Human Resource Management Journal 24: 2, 159–175.

employees (Wright and Nishii, 2013), and because it is known that the perception of HR

practices, rather than the practices themselves, are responsible for employee reactions (Boxall

and Macky, 2009), we will focus on both actual and perceived practices. Regarding the latter,

the theory of perceived organisational justice (Greenberg, 1990) will be used to better

understand how employees’ differential responses to talent management are formed.

Overall, we make three main contributions. First, the few empirical studies that have looked

into the impact of talent management have only focused on outcomes at the macro level, while

we argue that these practices have an impact at the micro level as well. Our first contribution

is, therefore, to compare the differential reactions of high and non-high potentials themselves.

Second, the few studies that did examine differential reactions predicated their results upon

employees’ own perceptions of being identified as a high potential (or not) (Björkman et al.,

2013). This procedure does not only increase the risk that the findings are affected by common

method variance; such a design is also inappropriate to study the effects of the actual,

implemented differentiation between employees. To address this limitation, we will use

archival data to operationalise an employee’s identification as a high potential. Third, to

provide practical guidelines for HR practitioners in implementing talent management practices,

we need to understand the reasons behind the differential reactions of employees. Therefore,

we will examine the underlying psychological processes that are involved in shaping the

employees’ differential reactions.

LITERATURE REVIEW AND HYPOTHESIS DEVELOPMENT

Although talent management is a hot topic among HR practitioners, there is a lot of scholarly

debate about the term itself (Collings and Mellahi, 2009; Dries, 2013). In an attempt to reconcile

the different conceptualisations found throughout the literature, Iles et al. (2010) distinguished

four perspectives on talent management: first, an inclusive, people-focused perspective that

departs from the assumption that all employees have the potential to demonstrate talent;

second, an exclusive, people-focused perspective in which employees are differentiated

according to their added value to the organisation; third, an exclusive, position-focused

perspective in which people are differentiated according to the strategic importance of their

positions; and fourth, a social capital perspective that – as a reaction to the dominant focus on

talents as individuals – stresses the importance of considering the impact of the work context

(e.g. teams, leadership) when identifying high potentials.

In recent years, strategic HRM has been moving away from standardised practices that are

consistent across all employees towards a differential management of employees (Becker and

Huselid, 2006). Both the inclusive and the exclusive approach to talent management treat

employees differentially. However, whereas the inclusive approach provides customised

approaches for all employees, depending on their talents or needs, the exclusive approach

considers a workforce differentiation and mainly invests in a selective group of high potentials.

The underlying rationale of the practice of workforce differentiation is that it is believed that

organisations suffer unnecessary high costs when they invest equally in all employees (Becker

and Huselid, 1998). As a result, the scarce HR-related resources of an organisation ought to be

invested first and foremost in the attraction, selection, development and retention of high

potentials, as they generate higher productivity, and consequently higher returns, than

non-high potentials (Lepak and Snell, 1999; Morton, 2005; Collings and Mellahi, 2009).

In the present article, we study the repercussions of workforce differentiation for employees.

Therefore, we focus specifically on the exclusive perspective to talent management in which

employees are identified as high potentials (or not) according to their estimated added value

High potentials and justice

HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT JOURNAL, VOL 24 NO 2, 2014160

© 2013 John Wiley & Sons Ltd.