Talent Management and Organizational Diversity: A Call for Research

• Date: 01 December 2015
• Author: Valerie Anderson,Maura Sheehan
• Published date: 01 December 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/hrdq.21247

HUMAN RESOURCE DEVELOPMENT QUARTERLY, vol. 26, no. 4, Winter 2015 © 2015 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.

Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) • DOI: 10.1002/hrdq.21247 349

Talent Management and

Organizational Diversity:

A Call for Research

Maura Sheehan , Valerie Anderson

Talent management (TM) represents one of the fastest growing areas of both

academic research and HRD practice. Since proclamations of a “War for

Talent” in the late 1990s, talent management has become one of the most

common terms in the managerial and HRD practitioner lexicon (Minbaeva

& Collings, 2013 ). An increasing array of TM services features increasingly

in consultancy offerings. In May 2014, the American Society for Training

and Development (ASTD) renamed itself the Association for Talent Develop-

ment (ATD). Professional HRM Associations such as the Society for Human

Resource Management (SHRM) in the United States and the Chartered Insti-

tute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) in the United Kingdom have

recognized increasing interest in this area and have commissioned extensive

research into its use and practice in organizational settings. With the nota-

ble exception of Collings ( 2014 ), TM has achieved less attention in the HRD

scholarly literature. This editorial aims to address this “disconnect.” Drawing

on Collings ’ ( 2014 ) call for mature talent management to move beyond an

overemphasis on shareholder value and initial scholarship in the TM arena

and contributions to scholarly discourse we encountered at the European Uni-

versity Forum for Human Resource Development (UFHRD) 2015 conference,

we pose provocative questions that we hope will stimulate critical and robust

examination of TM from an HRD perspective, with a particular emphasis on

the implications of TM for organizational diversity.

There are good reasons why scholars have tended toward skepticism in

relation to emerging interest in TM. The discourse at its genesis of “super-

star” talent, resource scarcity, the dominance of shareholder value, and the

marginalization and often neglect of other key organizational stakeholders,

in particular employees, as well as a “win/lose warfare” ethos have done little

to advance critical analysis of the field. Indeed, in many areas, TM remains

firmly positioned as a normative and exclusive practice that targets the

development—from both external and internal sources—of a small propor-

tion of high-performing and high-potential employees in an organization

EDITORIAL