What is the value of talent management? Building value-driven processes within a talent management architecture

•Reviews the value claims made by four different talent management philosophies•Develops a theoretical framework to examine the value of talent management•Examines four concepts of value creation, value capture, value leverage and value protection

The paper uses two concepts to organize the talent management literature: talent philosophies and a theory of value. It introduces the notion of talent management architectures and first analyses four talent management philosophies and the different claims they make about the value of individual talent and talent management architectures to demonstrate the limitations of human capital theory in capturing current developments. Having demonstrated the complexity of issues being researched, it then synthesises these back down into a theory of value, and develops a framework based on four separate value-generating processes (value creation, value capture, value leverage and value protection). This framework draws upon a number of non-HR literatures, such as those on value creation, the RBV perspective, dynamic capabilities, and global knowledge management, and its use to understand the nature of value and how this might inform the design of any talent management system or architecture. The paper articulates 14 research propositions that the field now needs to prove and suggests how research might now address these.