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Human Resource Development Review 2016, Vol. 15(3) 340 –358

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Theory and Conceptual Article

The Cultural Evolution of Talent Management: A Memetic Analysis

Stephen Swailes1

Abstract Using the concept of memes as cultural transmitters and replicators, this article explores the origins of a talent meme and the subsequent evolution of talent management (TM). The sociogenesis of TM is traced through historic developments in management thinking. The rise of individualism in the late 20th century created the conditions for the birth of TM, and the proliferation of the meme since birth is analyzed. The meme reproduces through its psychological appeal and the logic of itself, and the article uses an established approach to reveal cultural rather than rational explanations for TM. Five reasons for the attractiveness, survival, and replication of the talent meme in business organizations are identified. They are salience with business conditions, lack of a competing meme, ambiguity, complexity reduction, and enhanced control over a powerful group. Understanding more about the psychological attractors attached to the talent meme forms part of an expanded research agenda.

Keywords talent management, memetics, innovation diffusion, organizational change

Introduction

As a distinctive approach to human resource management, the phrase “talent manage- ment” (TM) first appeared in the 1990s (Casse, 1994; Istvan, 1991) and now attracts a strong practitioner and research following (Lawler, 2008; Silzer & Dowell, 2010; Sparrow, Scullion, & Tarique, 2014). Although it can take many forms, it typically

1University of Huddersfield, UK

Corresponding Author: Stephen Swailes, The Business School, University of Huddersfield, Queensgate, Huddersfield HD1 3DH, UK. Email: [email protected]

664812HRDXXX10.1177/1534484316664812Human Resource Development ReviewSwailes research-article2016

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concerns the identification, development, and deployment of employees deemed to have above average potential to contribute to an organization. The primary variation involves a broadly elitist approach toward identifying high-performing and high- potential employees and providing them with a differentiated management experience to that enjoyed by the majority workforce. This may be complemented by a robust approach to managing employees whose performance falls below expectations which is necessary, in a “hard” TM mind-set, to liberate the talents of employees that poorly performing managers are suppressing (Michaels, Handfield-Jones, & Alexrod, 2001).

The idea of memes was introduced by Richard Dawkins (1976) as an analogy to genes and the ways that genes replicate and survive through time, and this article applies meme theory to explain contemporary interest in TM. Memes can be thought of as social cultural phenomena such as ideas or fashions that, like genes, adapt, repli- cate, and survive throughout time and which help to explain cultural transmission (Blackmore, 1999). Some memes are short-lived, others survive over long periods. They pass from brain to brain often with some level of variation occurring each time transmission occurs. The receiving brain becomes host to the meme and helps to prop- agate it. Religions, arguably, are memes that have adapted over a long time and which derive their survivability because they provide answers to some difficult questions about human existence.

There is considerable potential for the application of meme theory in organization development. Specific applications include advertising (Williams, 2000), mergers and acquisitions (Vos & Kelleher, 2001), marketing (Pech, 2003), the cultural evolution of the firm (Weeks & Gelunic, 2003), innovation (Voelpel, Leibold, & Streb, 2005), and busi- ness process reengineering (O’Mahoney, 2007). Defined originally as “a unit of cultural transmission” (Dawkins, 1976, p. 192), memes are elements of culture that transmit ideas and are passed on especially by imitation (Blackmore, 1999, p. 43). The replication of these cultural units helps to explain cultural evolution (Aunger, 2007); in this case, why some organizational cultures adapt to work with a talent mind-set. Management innova- tions that are successful, in the sense that they are widely adopted, are memes that “infect” organizations and are transmitted by and through, among other things, networks of execu- tives, consultants, gurus, and conferences (O’Mahoney, 2007). There seems little doubt now about the usefulness of the idea of memes to understanding cultural transmission because they contribute to the distinctive culture of organizations that is itself created by the enactment of combinations of memes (Weeks & Gelunic, 2003).

The theoretical treatment applied in this article builds on previous studies which have focused on coming to terms with the meaning of talent (Collings & Mellahi, 2009; Gallardo-Gallardo, Dries, & Gonzalez-Cruz, 2013; Nijs, Gallardo-Gallardo, Dries, & Sels, 2014; Tansley, 2011); understanding TM practices and their effects (Gallardo-Gallardo & Thunnissen, 2016; Thunnissen, Boselie, & Fruytier, 2013); and mapping the dominant theoretical frameworks (Gallardo-Gallardo, Nijs, Dries, & Gallo, 2015). An underlying assumption of the talent literature is that talent (typically defined as high-potential current or future employees) is scarce but when found, devel- oped, and deployed in pivotal positions makes a disproportionately high contribution to organizations.

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A feature of the literature, however, is an ongoing debate about the meaning of tal- ent and TM. For the most part, talent is assumed to be a relative quality of individuals such as ability or mastery (Gallardo-Gallardo et al., 2013) and is judged in relation to context. Talent is usually equated to a scarce combination of performance and poten- tial (Gallardo-Gallardo & Thunnissen, 2016) although inclusive approaches to TM see talent as something that all employees possess to some extent (Swailes, Downs, & Orr, 2014). However, debates about the etymology of “talent” (Adamsen, 2016; Tansley, 2011) or contemporary definitions of talent (Nijs et al., 2014) do not matter much for the present article because of its interest in explaining the spread of a meme for which ambiguity among its hosts is a key characteristic. What matters here is the cultural attraction to “talent” as a concept in business discourse rather than its various mean- ings to scholarly or practitioner communities because TM is essentially the manifesta- tion of the ways in which the talent meme plays out in the host organization. Related literatures on strategic TM (Sparrow et al., 2014) and global TM (Schuler, Jackson, & Tarique, 2011; Scullion & Collings, 2011) can be seen as mutations of the original meme.

Thunnissen et al. (2013) noted the top-down nature of TM and called for new per- spectives to widen its theoretical framework. Gallardo-Gallardo et al. (2015) identi- fied the resource-based view, international human resource management including global talent management, ways of assessing talent, and institutionalism as the domi- nant frameworks used to-date, and their treatment of TM as a phenomenon is pertinent here in emphasizing that practice is running ahead of theory (see also, Cascio & Boudreau, 2016). Although scholars have attempted to map the TM field, the literature contains little consideration of TM as anything but a rational choice. In a notable exception, Iles, Preece, and Chuai (2010) considered whether TM displays features of management fashions but do not explain its appeal and call for research into the factors behind its adoption. Cappelli (2009, 2010) shows how firms have used management development, and by implication historic approaches to TM, in response to changing market conditions but does not consider TM directly. The point of departure for the present article, therefore, is to trace the evolution of the specific notion of talent not the broader concept of management development and also to provide a fresh perspective on innovation transmission.

Of course, TM attracts a range of theoretical perspectives to explain why it occurs (e.g., organizational institutionalism), why it should work (e.g., resource-based view and workforce differentiation), and its effects on participants (e.g., organizational jus- tice), but the present article shows that they do not fully account for its popularity and to do so requires a consideration of TM over and above rational adoption. Memetics provides a unit of analysis that helps to understand the cultural transmission of ideas and thus the cultural evolution of organizations (Weeks & Gelunic, 2003). A memetic appreciation offers a complementary angle to the existing theoretical frameworks sur- rounding TM; in particular, providing a deeper understanding of why it is adopted.

Although the aim of the article is to show how and why TM spreads for non-ratio- nal reasons, this does not mean that it is irrational. The article seeks to understand why it has flourished and to explain why, in common with other human resource

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management practices (Lawler, 2007), it is popular ahead of a strong evidence base. The contribution of the article is to show how TM evolved and proliferated not simply because managers thought it had demonstrable connections to business performance, although many might have done so, but because of the attributes and internal charac- teristics of the meme itself. These are salience to competitive conditions, a lack of competing ideas, ambiguity in the meaning of talent and the ways it can be operation- alized, complexity reduction for executives, and providing a means of control and power over potentially threatening groups.

Methodological Approach

TM carries some characteristics of management fads and fashions (Iles et al., 2010), and it is important to understand why some ideas spread quickly and widely and why others do not. This means looking beyond the apparent costs and benefits of innova- tions that often do not completely explain why diffusion occurs (Newell, Robertson, & Swan, 2001; Scarborough, Robertson, & Swan, 2015). Explaining this seemingly con- tradictory aspect of innovation diffusion requires stepping beyond rational interpreta- tions of innovations and looking at alternative yet complementary theoretical explanations (Sturdy, 2004).

Of particular interest in meme theory is that explanations of innovation diffusion have traditionally focused on external, rational actors selecting innovations that would be the most successful for their situations (Abrahamson, 1996). However, rational approaches do not fully explain the choices made by organizations and attention turned to other factors that might influence management decision making. One of these fac- tors is the ability of an innovation to replicate, adapt, and spread. The emphasis thus shifted beyond external actors being responsible for diffusion and toward the innova- tion itself to better understand its ability to attract attention (O’Mahoney, 2007).

Epistemologically, the article assumes that the present has no distinct boundary with the past. The past has influenced the present, and any historical interpretation is shaped by the present (Jenkins, 1995). The basic approach to understand the sociogen- esis of TM is to start at the present and to go backward. The historical material used here is not exhaustive but, proportionate to the researcher’s reflexivity, represents the important building blocks in a complex pattern of management thinking.

Meme mapping is a new concept and to understand how TM evolved in manage- ment thought, Paull’s (2009) meme mapping approach is used to explore gestation events, the meme “birth point,” and subsequent meme development events. Events in the gestation period are precursors to the birth event, and some events in this period may be more influential than others. The historical development of the talent meme is traced through a series of database searches looking for the occurrence of “talent” in the source title. JSTOR was searched because of its historic coverage together with Scopus and Business Source Complete to assess the rate of diffusion of the meme in more recent business sources. The search focus was confined to “talent” because the term captures the specific notion of interest and because “talent” predates the use of “talent management” by centuries. The article next summarizes the gestation (sociogenesis) of

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TM. The particular birth point of TM is considered, and explanations for the prolifera- tion of the meme following the birth point are developed.

The Sociogenesis of TM

Memetic analyses require an understanding of events occurring prior to the creation of the meme itself (gestation events) to properly appreciate the social conditions from which a particular meme emerged. The idea that some people are more talented than others at art, sport, music, and science is a recurring feature of human society (Wolfle, 1971). As industrialization progressed in the 19th century, social transformations occurred that gave greater focus to individual achievements over birth status and group membership. As demographic and economic backgrounds began to offer a diminish- ing role in explanations for individual success, attention turned to understanding dif- ferences in mental characteristics (Jansz, 2004). John Stuart Mill in The Subjection of Women (1869), for instance, saw talent as a social resource and was concerned about the loss of talent caused by the ways that women were treated.

Durkheim gave talent central stage in his ideas on social justice. Individuals, he said, possess their talents by chance and should have equal rights to deploy their tal- ents to the extent that they possess them. Durkheim argued that because of their tal- ents, individuals would have different opportunities to realize themselves such that there will be inequalities in the ways that resources are allocated to individuals but that any such inequalities are unavoidable and may be just (Green, 1989) implying that people must be allowed to occupy positions that suit their talents if industrial systems are to function properly. Some inequality based on merit was unavoidable but was preferable to inequality based on social circumstances such as those that might accrue from fortunate parentage.

The Davis–Moore theory of functional stratification (Davis & Moore, 1945) fol- lows Durkheim’s thinking in assuming that some roles in society and business organi- zations require more talent to discharge than others. Societies and organizations place the more skilled and talented people into these roles, and the stratification that results from these processes is presumed to benefit society. Functional stratification draws attention to two things in particular: why some positions are deemed by society as more prestigious (more rewardable) than others and how it is that certain people come to occupy those positions. TM is more concerned with the second question, which is revisited later in the article.

By the start of the 20th century, definitions of talent and genius had attracted close scientific scrutiny (Fischer, 1904). Studies of individual differences showed how men- tal capacities vary naturally and how they connect to differential ability (Hollingworth, 1923). Social factors and their impact on talent development began to be recognized in the hope, perhaps, that replicating certain social conditions would allow greater talents to flourish in society (Faris, 1936).

More complete theories of talent followed that attempted to combine psychological dimensions, heredity, and general intelligence. Bray (1954), for instance, examined talent in business administration and clearly linked talent to success at the expense of a

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more balanced treatment of factors that might boost success or suppress talent. Treatises followed on the need for education and training systems to provide the men (talent was generally equated with being male) who would lead further cultural and economic progress (Brown & Harbison, 1957). The U.S. Committee on the Identification of Talent was created in 1951 and recognized the importance of power and individual adjustment to impersonal power systems in relation to talent recognition (McClelland, Baldwin, Bronfenbrenner, & Strodtbeck, 1958). The mobility of talent, popularized as the Brain Drain, and its links to social change, attracted attention in the 1960s (Adams, 1968; Ramsoy, 1965) as did the influence of talent on career achievement (Ginzberg & Herman, 1964).

By the 1960s, articles on the deployment of talent in business were appearing. The term “talent pool” was used in relation to concerns that talented people were choosing careers outside business (Twedt, 1967), and Patton (1967) warned of looming shortages of executive talent in the United States (see also McDonald, 2013b). The U.S. Civil Service Commission oversaw the “strategic deployment” of top executives into key roles (Bolster, 1967), and the strategic significance of aligning scientific talent with company profit objectives was recognized (Blood, 1963). The special treatment of talented employ- ees was recognized in the long term, manpower forecasting and planning strategies at the time, at least in the United States (Hinrichs, 1966; Vetter, 1967) where concerted efforts to isolate the qualities of managerial talent were underway (Ghiselli, 1971). Longitudinal studies of individual differences and their association with career success and on the dis- tribution of rewards appeared (Abrahamson, 1973; Husen, 1972). Concerns were also surfacing about shortages of managerial talent fuelled by the 1960s counterculture and changes to university education that were seen to be questioning authority in ways that discouraged young people from choosing managerial careers (Miner, 1974).

Another ingredient in the social conditions that created the talent meme occurred in the late 20th century when the concept of HRM embodied a re-evaluation of the con- tributions that employees make to organizations. Concurrent with the rise of HRM was a much stronger interest in fostering and creating high organizational commitment; the basic idea being that committed employees require less supervision and control to perform well (Walton, 1985). Efforts to raise employee commitment were underpinned by a range of HRM practices including contingent-based pay, team building, coaching, and leadership development to engender self-worth and self-efficacy. From the 1980s onward, collectivism and collective agreements declined as a way of managing. Individualism, individual contracts, and greater focus on individual performance gained fresh impetus (van Drunen, van Strien, & Hass, 2004). A psychological shift took place giving the self a more prominent place in organizational thinking.

An important function of labor markets is to allocate people of differing abilities to different sectors of the economy (Grossman, 2004) and, 200 years after Adam Smith realized the role of education and skills in wealth creation (Wolfle, 1971), economists began looking for explanations for the growth of income inequality and used talent heterogeneity as an explanatory variable (Bok, 1993). Rosen (1981) showed how art- ists with slightly greater talent earn much more than people with slightly less talent partly on the basis that “lesser talent is a poor substitute for greater talent” (Adler, 1985, p. 208). Adler (1985) extended this argument by showing that large differences

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in earnings (in the arts) can exist when there are no differences in talent, that is, stars can exist among people of equal talent, a phenomenon returned to below.

Giftedness and talent continued to attract attention (Heller, Monks, & Passow, 1993; Heller, Monks, Subotnik, & Sternberg, 2000) and with the contribution of talent in society well established in the collective consciousness by the late 20th Century, the conditions for the sociogenesis of a meme that would manifest as TM had been created. Interest in understanding the characteristics of high performers continued (O’Connell, 1996; Spreitzer, McCall, & Mahoney, 1997), and the conditions for meme creation, in an evolutionary sense, were created by a coalescence of economic liberalization in times of uncertainty, diminishing lifetime employment arrangements, increased exter- nal hiring in new organizational structures (Cappelli, 2008, 2009), free movement of labor and capital, efforts to inject private-sector practices into public management, privatization, and deregulation (see also, Adamsen, 2016). The confluence of economic forces and the pointing-up of competitive conditions on such a scale in a relatively short time brought organizational survivability into sharp relief such that concerted and explicit ways of managing talent, in contrast to management development, were a logi- cal way forward, particularly for large, private-sector organizations.

The Birth Point

In common with other innovations, TM arose from what came before; in this case, at least 100 years of thinking about the interrelationships between talent and society. To some extent, it is an aggregate of some older ideas around structured selection meth- ods, performance management, and career development (Cappelli, 2009). However, the critical adaptation was that TM emerged from these related but separate memes to embed itself as part of a complex set of memes that sustain and replicate it (a meme- plex). In essence, TM is the outcome of three things: a strong tendency in Western societies to stratify, natural and socially constructed differences in human ability, and distinctive economic conditions. The basis of stratification in this particular case derives from the abilities that signal a person’s economic characteristics and potential. The extent to which TM occurs in organizations is moderated by organizational tradi- tions and overlaying competitive and political systems.

TM is in effect an artifact that people experience (as participants or as part of a team designing and managing talent programs) and which is interpreted to give a particular functionality. Human minds construct representations of the artifact to fit a particular context (Aunger, 2007) which explains why talent programs differ in their philosophy and operationalization. Although talent programs require sets of interlocking human resource management practices, they are shaped and driven by a particular philosophy and mind-set. The practices are not the meme, the manifestation of the meme is the mind-set that shapes the practices.

The birth of TM in a business context, and as a distinctive aspect of management development, occurred sometime in the late 20th century. Commentators often attribute McKinsey’s 1997 “war for talent” report as a birth point for the sharp growth of interest in what has become known as TM (Chambers, Foulon, Handfield-Jones, Hankin &

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Michaels, 1998). The book of the report, The War for Talent (Michaels et al., 2001) is also widely cited as a seminal moment. The idea that organizations were fighting a “war” for executive talent caught on and propelled the talent meme across boardrooms. The rhetoric used by McKinsey was both assertive and moralizing; the “exultation” of strong leader- ship and high-potential employees, the immorality of the poor performer, and survival of the fittest analogies were all used to make the case (O’Mahoney & Sturdy, 2015). Michaels and colleagues claimed to have interviewed nearly 13,000 managers, produced 27 case studies, and held discussions with hundreds of other companies to derive five imperatives including developing a talent mind-set, rebuilding recruitment and development strate- gies, and differentiating among employees with “candid” performance reviews. They insisted that companies at the top of their talent “index” outperformed others by some distance and considered this to be “compelling” evidence that TM impacted positively on business performance. A causal relationship was in no doubt.

With so much data behind their claims, how could they be wrong? Recognizing the talent imperative was described as a strategic inflexion point; a turning point that compa- nies had to pursue or risk falling behind. It would take a very brave executive in corporate America to ignore it. The actual birth point, however, seems more likely to have been a few years before the influential McKinsey report since it is clear that some companies and large government offices were running variations of TM programs in the preceding years. McKinsey did not birth the meme, rather it was the fruit of a build-up of corporate think- ing, in the United States at least, that talent was the competitive weapon that organizations had been overlooking. However, McKinsey’s role in the sociogenesis of TM should not be underestimated given its long-standing influence over corporate America and how it thinks and behaves (McDonald, 2013a). It was a great example of the consultant’s trump card; a problem identified and a solution provided.

Meme Development

To track the popularity of TM and its progress into the consciousness of management scholars, the Scopus database was searched for “talent” in article titles. Limiting searches to social sciences only, in the 1970s and 1980s no more than five articles per year were indexed. Twenty two were indexed in 1995, 21 in 2000, after which the annual output increased steadily to 76 in 2005, 208 in 2010, and 202 in 2015. The peak year was 2013 with 252 articles. Scopus shows the increasing spread of the talent meme from 1996 to 1997 when the “war for talent” narratives were formulated up to 2010 after which the number of citations in the academic literature has leveled off. Repeating the same search for the annual number of hits in Business Source Complete, which indexes a wider range of scholarly and practitioner sources, showed a similar pattern. Twelve articles were indexed in 1990 after which the annual total grew steadily peaking at 717 in 2008 and was 679 in 2015. Both databases show that interest in TM as evidenced by citations has reached a steady-state.

TM derives its survivability in the pool of management memes from its own logic and psychological appeal in relation to uncertain business environments. It provides solace to executives since, if they deploy it, it looks as if they are doing their best to

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get the best out of their employees in difficult times. There is as yet little robust evi- dence that TM does actually improve survival rates (Collings, 2015; Silzer, 2010), but on the surface, it makes sense as a way of improving the chances of organizational survival even if considerable faith is also required. Each organization that pursues TM interprets it in its own ways and adapts it to suit its culture, traditions, and survival strategies. The talent meme can be thought of as the essential basis of the idea that the different organizations deploying TM albeit in different ways hold in common.

The progress of the talent meme is evidenced by a sharp rise in the amount of aca- demic and practitioner publications that has peaked in recent years, and the appeal of TM has continued unabated even in the face of some harsh criticism. Shortly after the birth point, Pfeffer (2001) argued that a talent mind-set could backfire by disaffecting the bulk of a workforce through the glorifying of an elite, undermining teamwork, and using TM to paper over some fundamental cracks in organizational systems and prac- tices. Gladwell (2002), drawing heavily on the Enron folly, criticized the talent myth that had become “the new orthodoxy of American management” pointing to failures in promoting on potential rather than proven performance and the narcissistic behavior of many who do achieve promotions.

But the logic of managing talent outmaneuvered its doubters and the meme spread. In addition to the meme’s seductive logic, the meme’s progress was boosted and sus- tained by the actions of some high-profile consulting firms and the ways that they communicate with corporate clients. In 2013, consultants AM Azure published an analysis of what became of the companies glorified in the original War for Talent. Of the 106 companies that were identifiable, one third had disappeared and one third had “done OK” or better. The others were somewhere in between. Of the 27 case studies in War for Talent, about a quarter had continued to deliver good profitability but nearly half had either disappeared or posted …

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Journal of General Management Vol. 26 No.2 Winter 2000

A Reappraisal ofHRM Models in Britain by Pawan s. Budhwar

Human Resource Management is still struggling to find a strategic role.

For a better understanding ofthe subj ect, both management practitioners and scholars need to study human resource management (HRM) in context [1]. The dynamics of both the local/regional and international/ global business context in which the firm operates should be given a serious consideration. Similarly, there is a need to use multiple levels of analysis when studying HRM: the external social, political, cultural, and economic environment; and the industry. Examining HRM out-of-context could be misleading and fail to advance understanding. A key question is how to examine HRM in context? One way is by examining the main models of HRM in different settings. However, there is no existing framework that can enable such an evaluation to take place. An attempt has been made in this paper to provide such a framework and empirically examine it in the British context.

This paper is divided into three parts. Initially, it summarises the main developments in the field of HRM. Then, it highlights the key emphasis of five models of HRM (namely, the 'Matching model'; the 'Harvard model'; the 'Contextual model'; the '5-P model'; and the 'European model' ofHRM). Lastly, we will address the operationalisation of the key issues and emphases of the aforementioned models by examining their applicability in six industries ofthe Bri

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