Conceptualizing talent in public sector municipalities

Daniel Tyskbo

doi:10.1177/00208523211065162

Abstract

While talent management is considered a top priority among practitioners and constitutes a major research area, the actual meaning of talent still remains largely undefined. In response to a lack of clarity and empirical basis regarding the notion of talent, various calls have been made for exploring how organizations conceptualize talent, particularly in the public sector context. This article answers these calls by adopting a qualitative in-depth case study to explore how senior Human Resources (HR) managers in public sector municipalities conceptualize talent in practice. The findings illustrate how HR managers use a variety of conceptualizations of talent. We analyze and theorize this variation and the ways of conceptualizing talent using two conceptualization categories: non-contextual conceptualizations, which are general and related to official practices (i.e. talent as future leaders and talent as a general commitment and drive forward), and contextual conceptualizations, which are specific and related to informal assumptions (i.e. talent as Trojans and specialists, talent as individual agility, and talent as public service awareness).Points for practitionersHuman Resources (HR) managers use a variety of conceptualizations of talent in practice. Two conceptualization categories – that is, “non-contextual” (general and related to official practices) and “contextual” (specific and related to informal assumptions) – help us understand this variation and the ways of conceptualizing talent. HR managers are only partly shaped by the particularities of the public sector context, and some of the talent philosophies held by HR managers do not align with the existing and official talent management practices.

Highlights

While there has been a surge in research on talent management (TM) (Collings et al, 2018), the actual meaning of talent is still largely undefined (Gallardo-Gallardo et al, 2013; Meyers et al, 2020)
We ask the following research question: How do Human Resources (HR) managers conceptualize talent in public sector municipalities? By focusing on public sector municipalities, we aim to reveal whether there are any particularities of the public sector context that shape the meaning of talent, thereby providing important and sought-after insights into whether the TM ideas prevalent in the literature on private organizations resonate in other contexts, such as in public sector organizations (Kravariti and Johnston, 2020; Thunnissen et al, 2013; Wiblen and McDonnell, 2020)
We address this by using a qualitative in-depth case study focusing on the practice level, thereby showing how talent is conceptualized in practice by HR managers

Summary

Introduction

While there has been a surge in research on talent management (TM) (Collings et al, 2018), the actual meaning of talent is still largely undefined (Gallardo-Gallardo et al, 2013; Meyers et al, 2020). Various calls have been made for research exploring how talent is understood in organizations, in the public sector context (Thunnissen and Buttiens, 2017; Tyskbo, 2019; Wiblen and McDonnell, 2020) This article answers these calls by contributing to better conceptualization of talent through focus on the context of public sector municipalities. Public sector organizations are highly impacted by the orientation of delivering services to people with a purpose of doing good for others and society (Perry and Hondeghem, 2008) With this focus on improving the lives of the people they serve and responding to societal needs, we would expect these organizational values to impact how HR managers think about the talent needed to deliver against these ambitions (Mensah, 2019).

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