Talent Management in Knowledge-Intensive Organizations

In many organizations knowledge becomes increasingly important for sustaining competitive advantage. Knowledge-intensive firms (KIFs; Alvesson, 2004) gain competitive advantage by continuous adaptation to their environment. This constant adaptation to the competitive environment is realized by the unremitting generation and use of new knowledge (Harrison & Kessels, 2004, p. 3). Thus, for KIFs the strategic capacity to compete flows from knowledge; this knowledge is mainly derived from people (Kessels, 2004). Therefore it is assumed that managing their workforce’s knowledge has become ever more critical to organizations. The relevance of HRM to knowledge management debates has long been noticed (e.g. Haesli & Boxall, 2005; Scarbrough, 2003; Storey & Quintas, 2002). Knowledge presumes knowing subjects, and therefore management focusing on knowledge and learning needs to pay attention to these subjects. Because of the emphasis on the knowledge people in knowledge-intensive firms possess and may create, organizations constantly need to find ways to make better use of this knowledge. Here, improved knowledge usage does not just concern better exploitation of existing knowledge sources but also leveraging the knowledge creation capability hidden in available knowledge. Even the most intelligent knowledge-based systems remain void of knowledge without intelligent users of these systems. As Kaulingfreks (2002) argues, knowledge management in an ICToriented approach easily runs the risk of producing erudite folly because of its preoccupation with information. What gets lost in even the most user-friendly and fully updated storage of best practices, Kaulingfreks argues, is the contextual, individual, nontransferrable, purposeless activity that knowledge is. Introductions into KM nowadays are considered incomplete if they do not pay sufficient attention to HRM and HRM handbooks typically include a chapter or section on knowledge and learning (e.g. Harrison & Kessels, 2004; Redman & Wilkinson, 2006; Adams, 2006). A possibly interesting yet mostly unexplored domain of managing knowledge via HRM is by means of talent management. Since the late 1990s the interest in the topic of talent management has grown considerably. In 1997 a group of McKinsey consultants formulated the importance of talent for the performance of organizations by coining the ‘War for Talent’. Since then the topic of talent management has received a remarkable degree of practitioner and academic interest (Gollings & Mellahi, 2009, p. 2). Changes in the environments of organizations such as globalization, growing operational complexity, an aging workforce, scarcity of talent, and greater international workforce mobility made the