Rethinking Talent: Conceptual Foundations, Mechanisms and Context in Talent Management

Talent management (TM) has become a central concern for organizations seeking to build and sustain competitive advantage through their workforce. Yet despite growing academic and practitioner interest, fundamental questions persist about what talent actually is, how it should be identified, and whether TM programs deliver on their promises. This dissertation addresses these questions through three interrelated studies that contribute to the theoretical and empirical understanding of talent within organizations. Combining conceptual, experimental, and quasi-experimental methods, the dissertation advances both talent management and strategic human capital theory by bridging gaps in conceptualization, mechanisms, and contextual sensitivity. Chapter one, co-authored with David G. Collings and published in Human Resource Management Journal, systematically reviews 192 peer-reviewed articles across the talent management, high-potential, and star literatures to examine how talent is defined and conceptualized. The review identifies five key tensions underpinning talent definitions and argues that existing research often treats talent through binary categories, creating conceptual rigidity. Drawing on paradox theory and matching theory, the paper proposes an integrative framework that embraces the co-existing facets of talent rather than forcing dichotomous choices, thereby laying the conceptual foundation for the empirical investigations that follow. The second chapter investigates how decision-makers weigh human capital and social capital when selecting internal candidates as talent. Using a mixed-methods design combining a vignette experiment with qualitative interviews in a multinational engineering firm, the study finds that while both forms of capital matter, social capital is the dominant predictor of talent evaluations. Human capital functions as a necessary baseline rather than a differentiating signal. Notably, the findings reveal that the cost of lacking social capital is amplified for global positions, where high human capital without relational capability is perceived as a liability rather than merely an absence of advantage. Finally, the third chapter, co-authored with Dana Minbaeva and Larissa Rabbiosi, disentangles the selection and development effects of TM programs on deployment (promotion) in key positions. Using longitudinal data from a Danish multinational corporation and employing coarsened exact matching, propensity score matching, and difference-in-differences estimation, the analysis shows that TM participants are systematically more likely to be deployed in key positions than matched non-participants. This deployment is not explained by improvements in individual job performance, and we suggest that TM programs generate value through the development of strategic human capital resources that transcend individual skill enhancement. In sum, this dissertation advances theories related to talent identification, talent development, and strategic human capital with the aim of also providing actionable insights for organizations seeking to design more effective and evidence-based talent management systems.