How Inclusive Can Exclusive Talent Management Be?

Abstract

Talent management (TM) is widely seen as a key organizational challenge necessary to sustain competitive advantage. While academia has mostly focused on HRM practices associated with exclusive TM targeting organizational high performers at higher managerial levels, there are reasons why organizations should consider a more inclusive talent management (ITM) approach. They include the growing diversification of organizations and the global workforce caused by demographic changes and mobility across borders, overall talent scarcity and hard to predict market dynamics which all make future talent needs hard to anticipate. Issues such as employee perceptions of organizational justice and fairness are also important. Moreover, existing HRM orthodoxy concerned with investing in the company’s human resource and the wellbeing of employees pushes companies to invest in ITM as a path to a better working environment characterized by openness, trust and overall well-being. Few TM researchers, however, pay sufficient attention to the problems of organizational inequality and social segregation that exclusive TM might occasion and thus disregard how social exclusion and economic inequality continue to characterize many organizations. The ambition of this chapter therefore is to contribute to the development of an inclusive approach to TM. We add to the notion of ITM by bringing in literature on inclusive organizations which is absent from current theoretical development. Building on current conceptualizations in particular by Swailes et al. (2014) and Meyers and Woerkom (2014), we ask: How can literature on organizational inclusion contribute to developing more fair and equal organizations through inclusive TM practices?