Employee attributions of talent management

In this chapter, we turn the spotlight on talent management, often viewed as a critical challenge for HR managers and their organizations. Viewing talent management as an HRM system, encompassing recruitment, selection, training and development, and remuneration, we draw upon the HR process perspective (Bowen & Ostroff, 2004; Ostroff & Bowen, 2016) to deepen our understanding of how employee perceptions of talent management as well as their attributions of the process influence their feelings and attitudes about work. On the basis of social information processing theory and based on qualitative empirical data gathered from a series of case studies in Danish SMEs utilizing talent management initiatives, our findings suggest that employee engagement and retention are shaped in two main ways. First, we consider employee perceptions of talent management (i.e. how the process is implemented) and second, we explore the effect of employee attributions (Nishii et al., 2008) about why talent management takes place. In particular, we noted that perceptions of talent management practices signifying HR strength were formed during in the recruitment process, while employee attributions about the why the organization deployed talent management practices came into play at a later stage, during employment. Employee attributions appeared to be influenced by the organization’s core values, and the degree to which these values aligned with the internal organizational environment. Our results suggest that positive attributions occurred even when talent management recruitment messages were inaccurate. We discuss the conceptual implications of core values as an integrator of HR strength and HR attributions.