Organizations report great difficulty in measuring talent accurately, reflecting the lack of theoretical foundations for talent-identification in the HRM literature. This multidisciplinary review aims to contribute to the establishment of a stronger theoretical basis for talent-management by presenting a conceptual framework of talent in which the definition, operationalization and measurement of talent and its relation to excellent performance is clarified. We systematically introduce 11propositions into the framework, building on fragmented insights from the literature-from the fields of HRM, gifted education, positive psychology, and vocational psychology respectively-that will guide readers in understanding and applying the proposed framework. Starting from the HRM perspective on talent, we systematically incorporate insights from the divergent literature streams, which counteract some of the limitations inherent to the HRM literature and therefore can help establish better conceptual foundations for talent-management. The relationship between talent and excellent performance functions as a general framework within which issues of predictive and construct validity are addressed, across 11 research propositions. With the future research directions, we shed light on how talent-management scholars might further capitalize on the cross-fertilization between insights from different disciplines so as to gradually establish the theoretical foundations needed to transform talent-management into a legitimate field of academic study. By discussing managerial implications in the concluding part, we provide practical guidelines for designing talent-identification practices grounded in sound theory.
Search StrategyTo achieve a comprehensive multidisciplinary review of the literature on talentwhich could account for the evolutions within the field-we used 1993 as the starting point of our literature search, thus covering insights developed over the last twenty years. We took four different steps to establish the final body of peer-reviewed, academic articles considered in this review.Step 1: Clarifying the Talent ConstructIn order to find those articles that would be most informative for achieving conceptual clarity about talent, we first developed a general working definition of TALENT: A MULTIDISCIPLINARY REVIEW 3 talent based on the meaning contemporary English dictionaries ascribe to the term (Gallardo-Gallardo, Dries & González-Cruz, 2013). In the English language, talent is commonly understood as corresponding to an above-average ability that makes the individuals who possess, detect, develop, and deploy it, perform excellently in a given performance domain (Gagné, 2004;Tansley, 2011).Step 2: Selecting Search Terms We started our search by tracking articles that had 'talent' in their titles. As we were interested in talent and talent-identification in the context of the business world, specifically, we selected Business Source Premier as the database of departure. The use of talent as a search term resulted ...