When talent management goes wrong: Employees are people not commodities
Abstract
Purpose
This paper aims to address the following issues. The transactional view of workplace relationships has been challenged by discoveries of human behavior by neuroscience. Human beings are wired to have emotions and perceptions, and a workplace is no exception. Reframing the issue through a simple-yet-powerful framework, fundamentals of talent management can be restored, paving the way for a meaningful design of organizations.
Design/methodology/approach
Using rigorous in-depth secondary research about current talent practices, the report offers a novel framework to unlock the drivers of employee’s motivation and performance. The framework serves as a diagnostic leadership tool to identify breakdowns and foster a meaningful conversation to restore the organization back to equilibrium. A holistic alternative that is agnostic to the rank of the employee, job role and geography offers promise over the current practice of dealing with employee issues in fragmented manner.
Findings
The proposed framework helps identify the sweet-spot that lies at the intersection of three fundamental drivers: employee’s preferences on the type of work; employee’s core competency; and activities that are value-adding to the organization. The sweet-spot is the employee’s emotional wallet that the organizations must proactively capture to unlock the true drivers of motivation and performance. The proposed framework serves as a diagnostic tool to meaningfully tackle breakdowns and restore organizations to equilibrium. The sweet-spot provides the clue to design an effective organizational structure identify the enablers and catalyst that can unlock employee motivation and performance.
Originality/value
Despite new organizational complexities, the fundamental focus for talent management is to unlock the value of its resource. Despite the pristine appeal of this fundamental tenet of talent management, it is ironic that HR has drifted its focus from its core. Reframing the issue through a simple-yet-powerful framework, fundamentals of talent management can be restored, paving the way for a meaningful design of organizations. This is a paradigm shift for talent management to get back to basics of what really matters to the organizations.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Retraction notice
The Publisher wishes to retract the precis article “Time for leaders to ‘unmanage’? How to find the organizational sweet spot”, published in Development and Learning in Organizations: An International Journal, Vol. 28 No. 5, 2014. It has come to the attention of Emerald Publishing that this precis article contains large sections of unattributed text taken from the original research article “Can people really be managed?” by Charles Ehin, published in International Journal of Commerce and Management, Vol. 23 No. 3, 2013.
Precis articles are intended to summarise original academic research articles for a different audience, and should not include verbatim passages from the original articles. This error occurred due to a miscommunication in the commissioning process.
To avoid any repeated incidents of this nature, Emerald has fully revised its guidelines and briefed its Commissioning Editors. Development and Learning in Organizations: An International Journal sincerely apologises to the original authors and its readers for this error. The original article can be viewed here: 10.1108/IJCoMA-04-2011-0007.
Citation
(2014), "When talent management goes wrong: Employees are people not commodities", Development and Learning in Organizations, Vol. 28 No. 5, pp. 24-26. https://doi.org/10.1108/DLO-06-2014-0046
Publisher
:Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Copyright © 2014, Emerald Group Publishing Limited