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The purpose of this paper is to examine the perceptions of strategic actors in multinational organisations and to contribute to our understanding of how multinational companies articulate and define talent management and how – or what – they perceive its value to be.

The paper is based on an empirical research study in which data were collected through 50 in-depth interviews across five multinational companies, conducted at a regional level across ten countries. Participants in the study were strategic actors representing two groups of managers/leaders (HR and talent management system designers and business leaders who are directly involved in the implementation of talent management).

The absence of a formal talent management definition led to the emergence of different views and interpretations of what it is. It was viewed as a bundle, or set, of management ideologies manifested in all HR-related practices across four key areas: hiring the right talent, performance management, succession planning and development and retention. Performance management acted as the cornerstone. Talent management strategies displayed little participation for both system designers and implementers and distinct patterns of mystification, technologization and concretisation. The language of value was uncommonly used but provoked different ways of thinking about the role and meaning of talent management.

The strategic actors in the talent system continue to see talent management in narrow functional and HR process terms. However, by bundling these HR functions and processes together, it is evident that they can be encouraged to recast their activity in a broader strategic narrative. Borrowing the notions and theories of value and value creation, and investigating talent management through this lens, should help to surface interesting insights into how talent management might be defined in practice, and how the language of value may in future be used to understand what talent management really is.

The global study underpinning this paper attempts to deconstruct the understanding that strategic actors have about talent management from an empirical base. It contributes to the conceptual development of the talent management discourse by revealing the logics being pursued and address the definitional problem currently evidenced in the literature. It also provides direction for future research.

The traditional approach to management development — based on identification of talent and a planned career structure — will have to adjust to shrinking job and promotion opportunities. But organisations still need to plan for management succession. Four approaches are suggested, including early retirement into consultancy roles which would unblock career paths and, most radically, experiments with new forms of work relationship.

This study extends the contention that national culture affects human resource management (HRM) policies and practices and explores meaning and values of work orientation (MVWO) as an element of national culture in predicting HRM policy‐practice design choices. The data were obtained in a sample of 487 employees in domestic and foreign‐invested firms (FIF) in Sri Lanka. Eight distinct MVWO patterns emerged from the sample. Twenty‐six HRM design choices were clustered into four components: planned and open career and empowering system, qualifications and performance based reward system, generic functional perspective of job‐person fit, and job‐related competence and rewards. All the four HRM preference practices are influenced by MVWO. The evidence suggests MVWO relativity of HRM design choices in Sri Lankan context. The question of transferability of empowering and performance management to developing countries becomes evident. Moreover, MVWO relativity of HRM design choices is relatively high in FIF, reflecting that the “type of ownership” can have an impact not only on actual HRM practices but also on preferred HRM practices in FIF. The existence of business in the long‐run and host government expectations also seem to be important factors in understanding HRM preferences in FIF. Theoretical and practical implications for international HR managers are discussed.

The purpose of this paper is to introduce an integrated three‐phase methodology for forecasting future competency requirements more effectively than existing methods.

The methodology is demonstrated with reference to empirical research conducted by the authors. The methodology consists of three phases: phase 1 – preliminary interviews, phase 2 – questionnaire, and phase 3 – critical incident technique interviews. Outputs from phases 1 and 2 are used to generate a framework through which to elicit future competency requirements during phase 3.

The empirical findings, although included, are incidental to the current paper; they serve solely to illustrate the methodology. As such, the development and demonstration of this methodology are the main “findings” of the paper.

Methodologies for forecasting future competency requirements should adopt structured integrated approaches to improve predictive accuracy.

The methodology is described in sufficient detail so as to enable its practical application by HR professionals and academic researchers alike. Both groups will find this methodology extremely useful.

The paper seeks to improve upon existing methods for forecasting future competency requirements. By addressing the limitations of existing methods, and also by merging previously independent approaches, it provides an innovative integrated methodology of significant value.

This paper is developed from the second author's ongoing Ph.D. research, which focuses on the managerial thinking (personnel specialists) about strategic management of human resources from a cross‐cultural viewpoint between India and Britain. The Indian Personnel Specialists are under a severe pressure to bring about large scale structural changes in their organisations to cope with the challenges thrown by the recent liberalised economic policies. The role of Human Resource (HR) function has become more important than ever in such conditions. An attempt is therefore made to analyse the HR function in India in the changing economic environment. The influence of a number of national and contingent variables on the HR function is therefore studied to place it against the worldwide patterns of Human Resource Management (HRM) practices.

As founding editors of the Journal of Organizational Effectiveness: People and Performance, this paper welcomes the beginnings of a new academic community. The purpose of this paper is to outline why both academic researchers and organizational practitioners need to enter into and be guided by a new debate and new set of expertise. It signals the sorts of research agendas that need to be addressed in this field.

The paper establishes the future research agenda for organizational effectiveness. It reviews historic literature and traces the development of the field of organizational effectiveness from: early analysis of political judgements about effectiveness; systemic analysis of the intersection of profitability, employee satisfaction and societal value; debates over stakeholder, power, social justice and organizational fitness, resilience and evolution; the importance of mental models of senior managers; how organizations use changes in work system design and business process to modify employee's mental, emotional and attitudinal states; and the use of an architectural metaphor to highlight the locus of value creation perspectives.

There are many echoes of the debates and concerns today in the past. The paper shows how current concerns over strategic and business model change, organization design, talent management, agile and resilient organization, balanced scorecard, employee engagement, advocacy and reputation can be informed, and better contextualized, by drawing upon frameworks that have previously arisen.

The paper argues that the authors must adopt a broad definition of performance, and examine how the achievement of important strategic outcomes, such as innovation, customer centricity, operational excellence, globalization, become dependent on people and organization issues. It signals the need to focus on the intermediate performance outcomes that are necessary to achieve these strategic outcomes, and to examine these performance issues across several levels of analysis such as the individual, team, function, organization and societal (policy) level.

The audience for this paper and the journal as a whole is academics who work on cross-disciplinary research problems, the leading human resource (HR), strategy or performance research centres, and finally senior managers and specialists (not just HR) from the internal centres of expertise inside organizations who wish to keep abreast of leading thinking.

The paper argues the need to combine human resource management perspectives with those from decision sciences, supply chain management, operations management, consumer behaviour, innovation, management cognition, strategic management and its attention to the resource-based view of the firm, dynamic capabilities, business models and strategy as practice. It argues for a broadening of analysis beyond human capital into related interests in social capital, intellectual capital and political/reputational capital, and for linkage of the analysis across time, to place the novelties and contexts of today into the structures of the past.