ABSTRACT
Talent management is increasingly identified as a critical success factor in the corporate world. The topic came to prominence in the late 1990s when a group of McKinsey consultants coined the term The War for Talent (for a summary see Michaels, Handfield-Jones and Axelrod, 2001). The typical focus of talent management is on differentiated performance. For the McKinsey consultants this differentiation related to individual employee performance. The key focus of this approach is that all roles within the organisation should be filled with ‘A performers’, referred to as ‘topgrading’ (Smart, 1999) and it emphasizes the management of ‘C players’, or consistently poor performers, out of the organization (Michaels, Handfield-Jones and Axelrod, 2001). Appositely an emerging stream focuses on the differentiation of positions. The emphasis here is on the identification of key positions which have the potential to differentially impact the competitive advantage of the firm (Boudreau and Ramstad, 2007; Huselid et al., 2005). The point of departure is identification of key positions rather than talented individuals per se (see also Collings and Mellahi, 2009).
