The impact of exclusivity in talent identification: sources of perceived injustice and employee reactions
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/ER-03-2021-0123 |
| Published date | 01 April 2022 |
| Date | 01 April 2022 |
| Pages | 1217-1240 |
| Subject Matter | HR & organizational behaviour,Industrial/labour relations,Employment law |
| Author | Jonathan Peterson,Loubna Tahssain-Gay,Benraiss-Noailles Laila |
The impact of exclusivity in talent
identification: sources of perceived
injustice and employee reactions
Jonathan Peterson
CERGAM, Aix-Marseille Univ, Aix-en-Provence, France
Loubna Tahssain-Gay
Management and Corporate Environment Department,
ESSCA School of Management, Aix-en-Provence, France, and
Benraiss-Noailles Laila
IAE Bordeaux –IRGO - University of Bordeaux, Bordeaux, France
Abstract
Purpose –This paper examines antecedents to perceived injustice in exclusive talent identification practices.
Design/methodology/approach –31 in-depth intervie ws with individual s working in for-pr ofit
organizations in France were conducted and analyzed. Interviewees represented a variety of sectors such as
transportation, aerospace, energy and telecommunications.
Findings –The use of exclusivity in talent identification influences perceived organizational justice through
ambiguous advancement policies, support from hidden networks, lack of diversity in the talent identification
process, frequent gender discrimination, and premature labeling of talent. These practices suggest breaches in
procedural, distributive and interactional justice by allocating advantages to some employees over others.
Exclusivity yielded frustration, jealousy and potential retaliatory behavior against those individuals deemed to
be unfairly identified as talent.
Practical implications –The challenge of ensuring fair and equitable talent identification is a growing issue
for organizations. For managers, it requires paying close attention to how some forms of exclusivity in talent
identification may create unfair treatment of employees.
Originality/value –While organizational justice research focuses on the background and practices that
promote justice, our research finds its originality in examining the sentiments of injustice that remain
contextual, subjective and comparative.
Keywords Talent identification, Exclusivity, Organizational justice, Perceived injustice, France
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
The study of talent management has been the focus of many academic and professional
publications,tracing itsroots to the work of McKinsey & Companyfrom the mid-1990s through
to the early 2000s on the “War for Talent”(Michaels et al.,2001). While companies need to
effectivelyattract and retain highly-qualified employeesin order to achieve theirorganizational
objectives,a number of recent studieshave stressed the need for talentmanagement research to
place greater emphasis on issues of perceived fairness and the dangers of perpetuating
inequalityin employee populations(Downs and Swailes,2013;Meyers and van Woerkom,2014;
Sheehan and Anderson,2015).
The identification of employees consideredas the “superstar”or “high potential”may lend
itself to a belief in resource scarcity, driving organizations to align their talent identification
practiceswith the targeting of a small exclusivesegment of a potentiallylarger available talent
pool(Sheehan and Anderson, 2015).In so doing, an exclusive(albeit elitist)approach may create
perceptions of inequity, which lead to a lack of workforce diversity, potential discrimination
and ethicalissues (Sorcher and Brant, 2002;Swailes, 2013;Collings,2014). Moreover , questions
emerge as to whether or not talent identification is, at times, arbitrary, inconsistent and
ambiguous (Sorcher and Brant, 2002). Investigating the impact of exclusivity in talent
Exclusivity in
talent
identification
1217
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https://www.emerald.com/insight/0142-5455.htm
Received 24 March 2021
Revised 7 December 2021
27 February 2022
Accepted 9 March 2022
Employee Relations: The
International Journal
Vol. 44 No. 6, 2022
pp. 1217-1240
© Emerald Publishing Limited
0142-5455
DOI 10.1108/ER-03-2021-0123
identification is not fully addressed in the literature (Vaiman et al., 2012;Collings, 2014;
Theodorakopoulos and Budhaw,2015). Perceived organizationaljustice is influenced by talent
identification practices (Gelens et al.,2014) as well as perceptions of fairness and ethical
behavior in organizations (Swailes, 2013;Lacey and Groves, 2014).
This paper addressesthe call by numerous researchers (Harrisand Foster, 2010;Collings,
2014;Swailes et al.,2014) for more empirically based studies into the sources of perceived
injustice in talent identification practices. We address the way in which these practices
potentiallycreate an obscure side of talent management(Warren, 2 009;Swailes,2013;Sheehan
and Anderson, 2015) iftalent identification is based solelyon exclusivity. By examining how
exclusive talent identification practices lead to perceived injustice, we explore how different
talent identification practices may conflict with an organization’s more public and rhetorical
stance toward inclusiveness that may result in less diverse talent pools (Daubner-Siva et al.,
2017;Wright and Snell, 1998), and potentially negative work experiences (Ghosh et al., 2014;
Tzafrir et al., 2015;Khoreva et al.,2017;Daubner-Siva et al.,2017).
We utilize the theoretical lens of organizational justice to understand how perceived
injustices may impact employee engagement, productivity and performance through the
interaction of distributive, procedural and interactional (informational and interpersonal)
justice. We consider that those identified as high potential talent do not workalone since their
performanceand achievementis linked in some way to that of a team. Harrisand Foster (2010)’s
work in the United Kingdom highlights this point, suggesting that talent management
practices may originate from embedded organizational perspectives which seekequality and
diversity, yet through the use of exclusive talent identification and selection may result in
multiple sources of organizational inequality. These practices are not without consequence,
especiallyin team projects whose success is attributedprimarily to the efforts of a limited few.
Our work contributes to theoretical conceptualizations through in-depth interviews with
employees working within various organizations. Results detail employees’perceptions of
organizational justice within talent management practices based on exclusive talent
identification. In addressing this issue, we bridge the talent management literature with an
empirically based understanding of perceived organizational justice.
Our work also seeks to offer insights into the sentiments of perceived organizational justice from
contextual, subjective and comparative means. In doing so, we answer the call of scholars for
examining the effects of exclusive talent identification practices and how they are perceived at an
individual level (Aljbour et al.,2021;Al Ariss et al., 2014;Gelens et al.,2014;O’Connor and Crowley-
Henry, 2019).
The paper is divided into the following sections: we first review the relevant literature on
talent management with an emphasis on the talent identification process followed by a
discussion on perceived organizational justice. This is followed by a discussion of the study
context and an outline of our methodology. We then present the results of our qualitative
study before concluding with a discussion of our findings and suggestions for future work.
Literature review
Talent identification and talent management practices
Globalization has increased the corporate interest in talent management as organizations seek to
ensure that they develop and retain the best people in a market-driven environment (Berthon et al.,
2005;Martin and Schmidt, 2010;Benraı€ss-Noailles and Viot, 2020).Variousperspectivesoftalent
management are put forward in the literature, such as practitioner viewpoints (Lewis and Heckman,
2006), development of conceptual models with a strategic HR focus on filling critical positions
(Collings and Mellahi, 2009), integrative frameworks for global talent management (Tarique and
Schuler, 2013), discussions of assumptions and discrepancies from multidisciplinary views of talent
management (Dries, 2013), the economics of talent management (Thunnissen et al., 2013)and
conceptualizing the implications of future market challenges (Cappelli and Keller, 2014).
ER
44,6
1218
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