What is the meaning of ‘talent’ in the world of work?

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The article is a conceptual literature review published in Human Resource Management Review. It reviews the meaning of talent in the workplace, develops a framework for conceptualizing talent, and discusses implications for talent management theory and HR practice. It does not report a new empirical sample, statistical test, regression model, survey, interview study, or case-study dataset.

Research question

What does “talent” mean in the world of work?

More specifically, the article asks why the talent management literature remains conceptually confused and how different meanings of talent can be organized into a clearer framework for theory and practice.

The article focuses on several related questions:

• Does talent refer to people or to characteristics of people?
• Is talent mainly natural ability, developed mastery, commitment, or fit with context?
• Should talent management include all employees or focus on a selected elite group?
• What are the implications of different talent definitions for talent management theory and HR practice?

Hypotheses

Not specified.

The article is not an empirical hypothesis-testing study. Instead, it develops a conceptual framework based on an in-depth review of academic, practitioner, and linguistic sources.

Method

The article uses conceptual analysis and literature review.

The authors conducted an online search across ScienceDirect, Business Source Complete, Emerald, and Google Scholar. The keywords used were “talent” and “talent management.”

Although the review focused on scholarly peer-reviewed articles, the authors also included HR practitioner publications that are frequently cited in the academic talent management literature.

The final review included 170 peer-reviewed articles, 9 doctoral dissertations, 3 conference papers, 40 books, 6 working papers, and 20 HR practitioner reports.

The authors also supplemented the talent management literature review with a linguistic and etymological search. This included 10 Oxford University Press reference books. The purpose was to understand how the meaning of the word “talent” evolved historically and how that history may still shape modern workplace usage.

The article develops a framework that separates approaches to talent into two broad categories:

1. the object approach, where talent means characteristics of people;
2. the subject approach, where talent means people themselves.

The object approach is then subdivided into talent as natural ability, talent as mastery, talent as commitment, and talent as fit.

The subject approach is subdivided into inclusive and exclusive approaches. The inclusive approach treats all employees as talent. The exclusive approach treats talent as a selected group of high performers or high potentials.

Results / key findings

The article’s central finding is that the meaning of talent in the workplace is fragmented and inconsistent.

The authors argue that talent management research has grown rapidly, but the underlying construct of talent is often left undefined. This creates problems for theory development because researchers and practitioners may use the same word while referring to different things.

The first major distinction is between talent as object and talent as subject.

The object approach defines talent as exceptional characteristics of people. In this view, talent is not the person but something the person has, develops, applies, or demonstrates. Table 3 summarizes terms commonly associated with this view, including ability, capacity, capability, competence, commitment, contribution, experience, knowledge, performance, potential, patterns of thought, feeling or behavior, and skills.

The subject approach defines talent as people. In this view, talent refers either to all employees or to a selected subset of employees. This is common in organizational language, where managers may refer to “our talent,” “talent pools,” or “talent pipelines.”

The article argues that both object and subject meanings coexist in contemporary English and in HR practice. This coexistence contributes to confusion because one author may use talent to mean individual characteristics, while another uses it to mean a group of employees.

Within the object approach, the first sub-approach is talent as natural ability. This view treats talent as innate or partly innate. Talent is seen as a special ability, gift, aptitude, or disposition that some people possess more than others. The practical implication is that organizations should identify and enable talent rather than assume they can fully create it through development.

The second object sub-approach is talent as mastery. This view emphasizes deliberate practice, learning, experience, and demonstrated superior performance. The article discusses the idea that expert performance often requires long periods of focused practice. This view shifts attention from simply identifying talent to developing it and verifying it through evidence of performance.

The third object sub-approach is talent as commitment. This view links talent to perseverance, motivation, passion, discretionary effort, and willingness to invest energy into organizational goals. The authors do not present commitment as a stand-alone definition of talent. Instead, they argue that commitment is usually treated as complementary to ability or competence. A highly committed employee with low competence would not normally be labelled talented under this view.

The fourth object sub-approach is talent as fit. This view argues that talent is context-dependent. A person may perform exceptionally in one organization, role, team, or time period and struggle in another. This connects talent to person-job fit, person-organization fit, leadership context, team context, and opportunity to perform. The article links this logic to the ability-motivation-opportunity framework: ability alone is not enough if the person lacks motivation or the opportunity to apply it.

Within the subject approach, the inclusive view defines talent as all employees. This approach assumes that every employee has strengths and can potentially create value for the organization. It is often associated with strength-based talent management, broad development, egalitarian resource distribution, and the idea that firms should capture the value of the whole workforce rather than only a few stars.

The inclusive approach has practical advantages. It can support morale, development, engagement, and a more positive organizational climate. It may be especially appropriate in settings where value creation depends on the entire workforce, such as service organizations where frontline and support employees jointly shape customer experience.

However, the article also identifies a limitation of the inclusive approach. If talent means everyone, then talent management becomes difficult to distinguish from strategic human resource management or general workforce development. The inclusive approach may also create high development costs if organizations invest equally in all employees regardless of strategic role or performance potential.

The exclusive subject approach defines talent as an elite subset of employees. This subset usually consists of high performers, high potentials, or both. High performers are employees who currently demonstrate exceptional results. High potentials are employees believed to have the capacity to advance faster or contribute at higher levels in the future.

The article notes that exclusive talent management is common in practice. It is linked to workforce segmentation, talent pools, high-potential programs, and the allocation of more resources to people expected to generate higher returns. Supporters argue that differentiated investment can improve performance because scarce resources are concentrated where they are likely to create the most value.

The article also identifies several risks of the exclusive approach.

First, talent identification is often subjective. Judgments of performance and potential can be influenced by bias, politics, visibility, manager preferences, and halo effects.

Second, the assumption that “A players” are inherently different from others may be flawed. Employees can look like high performers or low performers depending on the role, context, leadership, team, and opportunity structure.

Third, past performance may not always predict future potential. An employee may perform well in a current role without being ready for broader or different roles.

Fourth, talent labels can create self-fulfilling prophecies. Employees labelled as talented may receive more support and opportunities, which helps them perform better. Employees not labelled as talented may receive fewer opportunities, which can suppress their development.

Fifth, being labelled as high potential may also create negative effects for selected employees, including fear of failure and higher sensitivity to feedback.

Sixth, allocating a large share of resources to a small group can damage morale among loyal employees who are excluded from elite talent pools. It may also reduce teamwork and increase destructive internal competition.

The article’s integrative framework appears in Figure 1. It shows the object approach on one side and the subject approach on the other. The object side includes natural ability, mastery, commitment, and fit. The subject side includes the exclusive approach, with talent as high performers and high potentials, and the inclusive approach, with talent as all employees. The framework shows that these approaches can inform each other.

A key conclusion is that the object and subject approaches should not be treated as isolated. The object approach helps specify what characteristics organizations should look for when identifying talent. The subject approach forces organizations to decide who counts as talent and where they draw boundaries or cut-offs.

Overall, the article argues that talent management cannot progress theoretically or practically unless organizations and researchers clarify what they mean by talent.

Practical implications

For managers, the article’s main implication is simple: define talent before designing talent management practices.

Organizations often implement talent pools, succession systems, development centers, high-potential programs, or workforce segmentation without clearly defining what talent means. This can create inconsistent decisions, unclear communication, and unfair employee perceptions.

Managers should first decide whether they are using talent as an object or subject concept. If talent means characteristics, the organization needs to define the relevant characteristics. These may include ability, skills, knowledge, performance, potential, commitment, fit, or a combination of these. If talent means people, the organization needs to decide whether all employees are considered talent or whether talent refers to a selected group.

The article is especially useful for HR teams because it shows that different talent definitions lead to different management systems.

If talent is seen as natural ability, the organization may focus more on selection, identification, assessment, and role placement.

If talent is seen as mastery, the organization may focus more on development, deliberate practice, experience, feedback, and demonstrated performance.

If talent is seen as commitment, the organization must pay attention to motivation, engagement, retention, and the meaning employees find in their work.

If talent is seen as fit, the organization must avoid assuming that performance is fully portable across jobs or organizations. Managers should consider whether employees are in the right roles, teams, and contexts.

The inclusive versus exclusive distinction is also important for practice. An inclusive talent philosophy may support morale and development across the workforce, but it can blur the difference between talent management and general HRM. An exclusive talent philosophy may allocate scarce resources more strategically, but it can also create bias, resentment, destructive competition, and missed potential among employees outside elite pools.

The article does not declare one approach universally superior. Instead, it argues that the best approach depends on the organization’s mission, culture, business model, labor market, and type of work.

For practitioners, useful diagnostic questions include:

• Does the organization define talent as people or as characteristics of people?
• Does talent refer to all employees or only to selected employees?
• Are high performers, high potentials, and strategically important roles being confused?
• Is talent seen as innate, developed, context-dependent, or some combination?
• Are talent identification systems based on clear evidence or mainly managerial judgment?
• Are talent labels creating self-fulfilling prophecies?
• Are excluded employees losing motivation because they receive fewer development opportunities?
• Does the talent philosophy fit the organization’s mission, culture, and business model?
• Is the organization buying talent, building talent, or trying to do both?

Theoretical implications

The article contributes to talent management theory by clarifying the underlying talent construct.

The authors argue that talent management has suffered from weak conceptual foundations because many studies focus on practices without defining talent itself. This article addresses that gap by organizing talent definitions into a structured framework.

The object-subject distinction is theoretically important. It explains why some definitions describe talent as ability, skill, competence, commitment, or potential, while others describe talent as employees, high performers, high potentials, or the workforce as a whole.

The article also contributes by showing that talent definitions are shaped by etymology and language. Historically, talent moved from meaning a unit of weight or money, to a valuable gift, to a personal ability, and later to people possessing ability. This historical evolution helps explain why modern usage carries both exclusive and person-centered meanings.

The article also contributes to debates about inclusive and exclusive talent management. Rather than treating these as simple opposites, the authors show that both approaches have theoretical and practical implications. Inclusive approaches emphasize broad human potential and egalitarian development. Exclusive approaches emphasize differentiation, strategic investment, and workforce segmentation.

The article also supports a more contextual view of talent. Talent is not only an individual attribute. It depends on fit with role, organization, timing, leadership, and opportunity. This challenges simplistic views that talent is always portable or universally recognizable.

Finally, the article identifies future theory-building needs, including a stronger nomological network for talent, clearer distinctions between talent and related constructs such as ability, competence, strengths, gifts, succession planning, and strategic HRM, and better process models of how talent emerges and is perceived.

Limitations

The article is a conceptual literature review rather than an empirical study.

The framework is based on reviewed literature and conceptual synthesis. It is not statistically tested with survey data, interviews, experiments, or archival organizational data.

Although the review is broad, it is not presented as a formal systematic literature review with detailed inclusion and exclusion criteria, coding procedures, or interrater reliability.

The article focuses on the world of work, but it draws partly on wider linguistic, educational, psychological, and practitioner sources. This is useful for concept development, but it also means that not all reviewed ideas are equally grounded in workplace evidence.

The article was published in 2013. Later developments in talent management, including debates on inclusive talent management, diversity and inclusion, algorithmic talent assessment, and responsible talent management, are not covered.

The article provides a conceptual framework but does not provide a validated measurement scale for each talent approach.

The article does not resolve which talent definition organizations should adopt. Instead, it clarifies the choices and tradeoffs. Managers and researchers still need to decide which definition fits their context.

Future research

Future research should continue developing talent as a construct in its own right.

The authors call for more theory development, including stronger conceptual distinctions between talent and related concepts such as strengths, gifts, ability, competence, strategic HRM, succession planning, and workforce differentiation.

Future studies could develop process models explaining both the actual emergence of talent and the perception of talent by managers, peers, HR professionals, and other stakeholders.

Researchers could examine how talent is conceptualized and implemented across organizations, departments, sectors, countries, and cultures. Multilevel designs would be especially useful because talent definitions may differ across organizational levels.

Comparative studies could examine why some organizations adopt inclusive talent philosophies while others adopt exclusive workforce segmentation. Interviews with HR managers and CEOs, combined with organizational-level surveys, could reveal the rationale behind different talent management decisions.

Future research could also examine the relationship between talent management approaches and outcomes. Important outcomes include employee motivation, morale, commitment, development, internal competition, turnover, productivity, innovation, organizational performance, and market position.

Another important research area is the reliability and validity of talent identification methods. Organizations need stronger evidence on whether their assessments of performance, potential, competence, and fit actually predict long-term contribution.

Researchers could also study whether exclusive talent labels create Pygmalion effects, resentment, destructive competition, or fear of failure, and whether inclusive approaches produce stronger workforce-wide engagement.

Future studies could examine how context affects talent transferability. A person who performs exceptionally in one organization may not perform equally well in another if the role, culture, team, incentives, or leadership conditions change.

Finally, future research could explore how newer technologies, such as people analytics, AI-based selection tools, and digital performance systems, shape the definition, identification, and management of talent.