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In this chapter, I propose an integrative framework for theorizing and empiricizing about talent management, based on the notion of “talent philosophies.” I believe that current debates about whether talent management should be inclusive or exclusive create the risk that our field will become fragmented, thereby undermining its social-scientific legitimacy. Nonetheless, this debate is absolutely correct in identifying the tensions between inclusive and exclusive approaches to talent management as a phenomenon. This, however, creates issues for talent management as a construct for scientific inquiry, as we need clear definitions and measures to create a cumulative body of research as a community. I propose that the solution lies in an expansion of our vocabulary as talent management researchers and identify four constructs that can help us structure and categorize our collective work: giftedness, talent, potential, and strength. Each of these constructs map logically onto different talent philosophies and talent management practices. In establishing “unity in diversity,” I believe talent management could finally make the transition into a more mature field of academic inquiry – although clearly phenomenon driven – characterized in equal parts by construct clarity, rigor, and relevance.

This paper aims to unpack how small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) can operationalise coopetition in talent management, addressing ongoing talent shortages in the hospitality industry which were intensified during the Covid-19 pandemic.

This conceptual paper draws from literature on coopetition and talent management in SMEs. Specifically, the authors take an interorganisational talent pool lens and develop a framework following the principles of open-systems theory.

The authors find that the traditional use of talent pools is often impractical for SMEs because of a lack of resources and capabilities. Instead, interorganisational talent pools, through coopetition in talent management, can aid these firms to address talent shortages. The authors identify potential for SME coopetition at various stages, including attraction, development and retention of talent.

Coopetition in talent management can aid industries in establishing market-thickening pipelines. Through co-attracting, co-developing and co-retaining talent, SMEs can create interorganisational talent pools. To develop talent management coopetition, a set of prerequisites, catalysts and potential inhibitors must be analysed and managed.

This paper moves the talent management debate beyond competition for talent, introducing coopetition as a viable alternative. Taking an open-systems perspective, the authors develop an integrative framework for coopetition in talent management in SMEs encompassing input, process and output components. The authors reveal the dynamic and complex nature of this coopetition process, highlighting the essential role of coopetition context and illustrating open-system principles.

“The unexamined life is not worth living” (Socrates). That is, without critically inquiring into the knowledge of life which is well-being and valuable, life is not worth living. Critical thinking questions existing theories and their unexamined and obsessive assumptions and generalizations, constraints, and “best” practices of the prevailing system of management and tries to replace them with more valid assumptions and generalizations that uphold the dignity, uniqueness, and inalienable rights of the individual person and the community. Better outcomes result from asking the right questions than from having the right answers. In the diverse, pluralist cultural environment of today, the promise of a truly generative dialog among Occidental (Western) and Oriental (Eastern) cultures and civilizations holds great hope for the future. Critical thinking (CT) is an “inclusive” thinking system that can facilitate this dialog such that all of us have a meaningful space and place in this universe. After defining CT and arguing its importance for executives, this chapter introduces CT in two parts: Part 1: Various Approaches to Critical Thinking; Part 2: Major Theories of Critical Thinking. Several contemporary business cases will be invoked to illustrate the need, nature, and scope of corporate CT.

The purpose of this paper is to emphasize the role of talent management (TM) in strategic renewal. Furthermore, the authors extend the existing knowledge on the process of TM implementation by underlining particular activities, which are involved in this process during strategic renewal.

The authors report a qualitative study of a TM program in a Finnish–Swedish Multinational corporation undergoing major strategic renewal. The data consist of 46 semi-structured interviews and secondary data.

The role of TM in the context of strategic renewal is to provide the conditions for the self-initiation and identification of potential change agents and for the development of the talented employees to perform in their roles of change agent. In the context of strategic renewal, TM process consists of identification of key projects to address critical business opportunities and challenges, the identification of talented employees to execute them, and the identification and creation of key positions.

The authors encourage scholars to explore the empirical settings characterized by change and unpredictability in more detail, and thus examine the role of talented employees and TM in other specific contexts. Future studies are also encouraged to study other cultural settings and examine to what degree the process of TM implementation may positively influence attitudes and behaviors of talented employees and, consequently, the overall organizational performance.

This study offers practical advice for top management and HR managers. First, the process of TM implementation during strategic renewal should start with the identification of “must-win-battles” that can have a more profound impact on change. Furthermore, top management should allow and enable motivated potential talented employees to volunteer for the job of aiding company-wide changes. Next, top management should provide the talented employees with the space to come up with novel ideas and conceive new business opportunities. Finally, the importance of transparent and spot-on evaluation criteria should be emphasized.

The study contributes to advancing our understanding of TM and strategic management in practice.

This paper aims to reveal gendered leadership constructs that hinder a competency-based view of leadership in Swedish-based global companies and the implications for leadership recruitment and development to top management positions.

The paper is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews, which have been analyzed using a gender analytic framework to identify how senior management, Human resource management and leadership trainees are discussing leadership and career development.

Three themes were identified as clouding the issue of gender-equal leadership practices thereby creating an opaque gendered lens of who is defined as eligible for leadership positions. The three themes were: symbols as gendered images, counting heads – preserving the existing system and illusive gender inclusion.

Recruitment practices were identified as contributors to homosocial practices that perpetuate male-dominated leadership representation. However, specific recruitment practices were not fully explored.

The potential use of gender equality as a sustainable management practice for competitive organizations to recruit and develop talented people.

To create resilient and gender-equal recruitment and leadership development practices.

This research offers an original perspective on gender representation at the senior management level in global companies by revealing gendered leadership constructs in the leadership recruitment and development process as antecedents to unequal gender representation in senior management positions.

Leadership cannot exist without followership. The phenomenon of direction and guidance, coaching and mentoring, has at least three components: the leader, leadership, and followers. With each component, the composition of purpose and goals, ethics and morals, rights and duties, and skills and talents is critically important. While the leader is the central and the most important part of the leadership phenomenon, followers are important and necessary factors in the leadership equation. Leaders and followers are engaged in a common enterprise: they are dependent upon each other; their fortunes rise and fall together. Relational qualities define the leadership–followership phenomenon. A major component of such a relationship is how the leaders create and communicate new meaning to followers, perceive themselves relative to followers, and how the followers, in turn, perceive their leader. This mutual perception has serious ethical and moral implications – how leader uses or abuses power, and how followers are augmented or diminished. This chapter features the essentials of ethical and moral, corporate executive leadership in two parts: (1) the Theory of Ethical and Moral Leadership and (2) the Art of Ethical and Moral Leadership. Several contemporary cases such as inspirational leadership of JRD Tata, Crisis of Leadership at Infosys, and Headhunting for CEOs will illustrate our discussions on the ethics and morals of corporate executive leadership.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an inside-out perspective on the practices and effects of talent management (TM) in a multinational organization.

The study adopts an autoethnographic approach focusing on the experiences of the first author during her employment in a multinational organization. This approach contributes to the literature by providing an insider talent perspective that thus far has not been presented in TM research.

Applying autoethnography as a means to address the inside-out perspective in TM reveals a tension. The authors label this phenomenon the “talent paradox,” defined as the mix of simultaneously occurring opportunities and risks for individuals identified and celebrated as a talent.

The paper may be of value to TM scholars and practitioners, as well as to employees who have been identified as high potentials or talents in their organizations. In contrast with the TM literature’s optimism, the findings illuminate that being identified as a talent may paradoxically produce both empowerment and powerlessness. Attending to personal aspects of TM processes is relevant for organizations as well as for individuals as it enables reflection and sensemaking.

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused severe challenges to ethnic minorities in the UK. While the experiences of migrants are both complex and varied depending on individuals' social class, race, cultural proximity to the host country and acculturation levels, more in-depth studies are necessary to fully understand how COVID-19 affects specific migrant groups and their health. Taiwanese migrants were selected because they are an understudied group. Also, there were widespread differences in pandemic management between the UK and Taiwan, making this group an ideal case for understanding how their acculturation journey can be disrupted by a crisis.

Qualitative data were collected at two different time points, at the start of the UK pandemic (March/April 2020) and six months on (October/November 2020), to explore migrant coping experiences over time. Theoretically, the authors apply acculturation theory through the lens of coping, while discussing health-consumption practices, as empirical evidence.

Before the outbreak of the pandemic, participants worked hard to achieve high levels of integration in the UK. The pandemic changed this; participants faced unexpected changes in the UK’s sociocultural structures. They were forced to exercise the layered and complex “coping with coping” in a hostile host environment that signalled their new marginalised status. They faced impossible choices, from catching a life-threatening disease to being seen as overly cautious. Such experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society.

It is important to note that the Taiwanese sample recruited through Facebook community groups is biased and has a high level of homogeneity. These participants were well-integrated, middle-class migrants who were highly educated, relatively resourceful and active on social media. More studies are needed to fully understand the impact on well-being and acculturation of migrants from different cultural, contextual and social backgrounds. This being the case, the authors can speculate that migrants with less resource are likely to have found the pandemic experience even more challenging. More studies are needed to fully understand migrant experience from different backgrounds.

Public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. In particular, this paper has shown how separation, especially if embraced temporarily, is not necessarily a negative outcome to be corrected with specific policies. It can be strategically adopted by migrants as a way of defending their health and well-being from an increasingly hostile environment. Migrants' home country experience provides vicarious learning opportunities to acquire good practices. Their voices should be encouraged rather than in favour of a surprising orthodox and rather singular approach in the discussion of public health management.

The paper has clear public health policy implications. Firstly, public health policymakers are advised to dedicate more resources to understand migrants' experiences in the host country. Acknowledging migrants' voice is a critical first step to contribute to the development of a fair and inclusive society. Secondly, to retain skilful migrants and avoid a future brain-drain, policymakers are advised to advance existing infrastructure to provide more incentives to support and retain migrant talents in the post-pandemic recovery phase.

This paper reveals how a group of previously well-integrated migrants had to exercise “coping with coping” during the COVID crisis. This experience, over time, challenged their integration to the host country, resulting in a loss of faith in the UK’s health system, consequently increasing separation from the host culture and society. It contributes to the understanding of acculturation by showing how a such crisis can significantly disrupt migrants' acculturation journey, challenging them to re-acculturate and reconsider their identity stance. It shows how separation was indeed a good option for migrants for protecting their well-being from a newly hostile host environment.

The purpose of this paper was to investigate the degree to which Entrepreneurship Education (EE) was being provided to secondary school students following changes to the Secondary School Curriculum in 2010 by the New Zealand Ministry of Education. Under these changes, secondary schools were charged with following an “entrepreneurial” approach to school instruction that would develop entrepreneurial behaviors in students.

The study used a qualitative methodology focused on gauging the reaction by teachers, students and their parents to this new teaching approach. The sample comprised ten secondary schools situated in Northland, New Zealand. A series of focus groups were used to solicit data among three levels under study in each school, i.e. teachers, students and parents. Individual semi-structured interviews were used to collect data from school principals to determine overall reactions to EE by the rest of the school.

Teachers reported benefits in terms of reduced direct teaching workload, increased participation from students and significantly improved scholastic results compared to targets set in the curriculum. Students reported positively on the greater degree of flexibility allowed under this teaching approach, while parents reported changes in attitude and more engagement in school activities and projects.

The continuing evolution of classroom education at secondary school level has long-term repercussions for student learning, engagement and retention as we move to the digital age. Similarly, there are also consequences for the evolving role of teaching, curriculum design and delivery.

The value of this research lies in a closer examination of the effects traditional teaching practices have had on secondary students entering the digital age. Furthermore, it investigates an alternative teaching approach through EE and the impact it has on student learning, retention and engagement.

The human resource and talent management fields have been increasingly focusing on the process and criteria to identify employees’ potential for career advancement due to their impact on the competitive advantage of organizations. This paper expands the extant theoretical and empirical evidence regarding these complex decisions, namely through the combined analysis of multidimensional sources of employees' capital.

This is a cross-sectional study. Data were collected from 384 individuals assessed by their line managers. The research model and hypotheses were tested using structured equation modeling.

The results show a positive and significant influence of four employees’ capital sources, namely: human capital (what you know), social capital (whom you know), psychological capital (who you are) and reputational capital (how others perceive us) with regard to judgments of potential for career advancement. The model explains 52% of the total variance in those judgments.

The data were collected using a questionnaire at a single point in time and thus, not allowing cause-effect inferences.

The results provide guidance to organizational leaders to improve the decision-making process regarding judgments of potential for career advancement.

To our knowledge, this is the first study to examine managers’ judgments regarding the potential for career advancement using four sources of employees' capital: human, social, psychological and reputational capital. Furthermore, it considers that reputation plays a mediation role.

:在人力資源和人才管理的領域裡,越來越多的焦點被放在找出員工職業發展所需潛能的過程和標準上,這是因為機構和組織的競爭優勢會受其影響。本文擬擴展關於這類複雜的判斷和決定的現存理論和經驗證據; 研究人員使用的方法為對員工資本的多維來源進行綜合分析。

:本研究為橫斷面研究。數據來自384 名受其直線經理評估的個別員工; 研究人員使用了結構方程模型,去測試其研究模型和各個假設。

:研究結果顯示,就員工職業發展所需潛能的判斷而言,存在著會帶來正面和重大影響的四個員工資本來源,這包括人力資本 (你所瞭解的事物) 、社會資本 (你所認識的人物) 、心理資本 (你是誰) 和聲譽資本 (我們予人的印象) 。有關的模型可說明判斷百分之五十二的總方差。

:由於數據的收集是於單一時間點和透過問卷調查而完成的,故未能收因果推斷的效果。

:研究結果給予組織領袖實際的指引,使他們在關於職業發展所需潛能的判斷上，能夠改善其決策的過程。

:就我們所知,本研究為首個研究、以四個員工資本來源,即人力資本、社會資本、心理資本和聲譽資本,去探討經理如何就職業發展所需的潛能作出判斷; 而且，本研究認為聲譽是扮演著調節角色的。