Demystifying Talent Management

A Critical Approach to the Realities of Talent

Billy Adamsen

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781349558247, 9781137508652
• eBook ISBN: 9781137508676
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Stratégie commerciale

Demystifying Talent Management questions the explanation of talent, that anyone who has 'more' has a talent, and demonstrates how the term 'talent' has become an empty signifier. The book asks if talent exists at all, and reflects on what the consequences for talent management within business and sports would be if this were the case.

1

The Gospel of Matthew – The Saying about Talent and Talent Management

Introduction

Christianity has had an influence on Western culture for centuries, even after the separation of religion from democratic, secularized mainstream cultural change. So, too, Christianity has influenced management culture and thinking. Within contemporary talent management, the adagium of talent derived from the Gospel of Matthew is still very much present, and has achieved widespread acceptance as an explanation of what it means to have or become a talent. The same notion is widely used to explain a social phenomenon that has accordingly been dubbed ‘the Matthew effect’, in which talented people receive an abundance of possibilities for advancement and recognition. In this chapter we take a closer-than-usual look at the Gospel of Matthew, and especially how the Parable of the Talents has been used and interpreted by sociologists. Based on a re-interpretation of the Parable of the Talents, the theory of the Matthew effect is subjected to critical analysis and revised, and at the same time the existence of an implicit view of talent and talent management in the Gospel of Matthew is revealed.

Even though Christianity today is separated, to some degree, from secularized aspects of Western culture, its cultural influence cannot be denied. Nor can the fact that the separation was never complete:

The importance of Christianity in the formation of Western civilization can hardly be denied. That importance is not simply a matter of the past. In the process of secularization Western culture did emancipate itself from its religious roots, but that emancipation was by no means complete. A complete break from Christianity was not intended in the seventeenth century by those who wanted to put the public culture on an anthropological rather than religious foundation. The issue as that time was not a revolt against the Christian religion, nor even against its influence on the culture.

(Pannenberg 1994:18)

Perhaps more importantly than 17th-century intentions – or perhaps as a legacy of and corollary to them – our own awareness of the religious and secular domains does not treat them as entirely distinct:

The secular was not outside the purview of Christian faith; Christian influence was not limited to what was viewed as religious. Rather, Christian faith informed the understanding of both the religious and secular realms. The very distinction between the religious and secular has its source in the Christian awareness that the ultimate reality of the kingdom of God is still future. That ultimate reality is at present only available through individual faith and the sacramental life of the Church.

(Pannenberg 1994:19)

As Max Weber showed years ago in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, this distinction between the religious and secular realms maintained the influence of Christian thinking (in particular, the value-oriented rationality which is the “spirit of capitalism”), along with its values of individualism, materialism, and organization, on Western (secular) culture (Weber 2012). These are the Christian cultural legacy to all current residents of Western countries. Recently, Dyck (2013) demonstrated how the Christian view and values, and especially the Gospel of Luke, has had an influence on contemporary management which can be traced back to management practices in the 1st century CE:

Research specifically linking changes over time in biblical interpretation, and their implications for organization and management theory and practice, is underdeveloped. However, there is a rich storehouse of historical information that scholars interested in these questions can draw upon. For example, in recent study Elden Wiebe and I examine how the meaning of salvation has changed from the first century to the present time, and trace the relationships to management theory and practice as the shifts occur.

(Dyck 2013:196)

This influence of Christianity on management in general, and talent management in particular, has become more obvious in recent years, and is sometimes even made explicit by means of references to the Gospel of Luke, the Gospel of Mark, and the Gospel of Matthew (Bothner et al. 2011). Today, the Gospels of Mark and Matthew are both used as metonyms for contemporary concepts in the management literature. The ‘Mark effect’ in (strategic) human resource management refers to the inclusive approach to human resources associated with the passage in the Gospel of Mark that reads, “But many that are first shall be last; and the last first” (King James 1611 10:31). The ‘Matthew effect’ refers to the general pattern of events in which someone who already is rich in social resources, and who is a ‘talent’, consequently has a further wealth of opportunities and resources available to them. The following saying, or, rather, this adagium, from the Gospel of Matthew has achieved widespread use as an explanation of what it means to have talent, or to be a talent, and also as a description of the Matthew effect: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not, shall be taken away.” In talent management research in particular, the Gospel is closely associated with the idea that possession of talent inevitably leads to an abundance of possibilities for responsibility and attention (Burkas & Osula 2011). But even well before the current surge of scholarly interest in explanations for talent, this key message of the story had been adopted by secular culture, along with other well-known passages and proverbs from both the Old and New Testaments, such as “no one can serve two masters; for either he will hate the one and love the other, or else he will be loyal to the one and despise the other […]”,¹ “and if the blinds leads the blind, both will fall into a ditch”,² “for every man shall bear his own burden”,³ “the rich rule over the poor”,⁴ and “ the borrower is servant to the lender”.⁵ The Matthew-derived view of talent, like these other familiar ideas, has been an adagium for centuries before the present day. People have experienced it as generally “true”, as correct on some gut level of feeling, and this has lent it credence that has steadily accumulated, until today it is referred to explicitly or implicitly in all of our notions of talent (Pannenberg 1994, Danesi 2000, Mieder 2008, Dyck 2013). No matter how talent is defined, at least since the 14th century (see chapter 6), ‘talents’ or ‘the talented’ have always been described as ‘having more’ than others have, whatever ‘more’ is intended to mean (mental endowment, specific abilities, wealth, etc.). This notion of having more is the essence of the meaning of the word ‘talent’, and the term derives its force from the clarity with which the notion matches up with our own everyday experiences. Because of this feeling that talent just obviously works this way, and because the Gospel of Matthew and his general view of talent have become so widespread within talent management, it is important for us to understand more clearly what the Parable of the Talents is about, and get a sense of what wisdom it has to offer us about the importance of having talent. So let us turn to the story itself.

In the Gospel of Matthew in the Parable of the Talents, a story is told about a wealthy man, the Lord, who decides to go on a journey and entrust his wealth to his three servants in his absence. To one of his servants, the Lord gives five talents, which is a weight of money corresponding to 75 pounds of silver; to a second servant he gives two talents, and to the third servant only one talent. His reason for giving different amounts of talents to his servants is simple: “to euery man according to his seuerall ability” (King James: Matthew 25:15). As soon as their Lord was gone, each of the servants made up his mind about what to do with his respective allotment of talents.

The servants with five and with two talents decided that the money should be put to work right away – invested, in order to accumulate more talents. Each doubled his allotment, the first servant accumulating five more talents and the second servant accumulating two more. The third servant, with only one talent, decided that instead of putting the talent he received to work, he would take good care of it. So he went off, dug a hole in the ground, and hid it until his Lord returned.

This he does, after a long time away, and as soon he is back he calls his servants to settle his accounts with them. The first servant tells him that since he was trusted with five talents he invested them and generated five more talents. The Lord is thrilled and proclaims that he will put him in charge of many more things in the future: “I wil make thee ruler ouer many things: enter thou into the ioy of thy lord” (King James: Matthew 25:21).

The second servant comes in front of his Lord and tells him that he did the same thing and generated two more talents. Once again, his Lord is excited and proclaims that he, too, will be in charge of many more things in the future.

The third servant shows up and tells his Lord that he took good care of his one talent and therefore was able to return the one talent to him again. The Lord becomes upset and accuses him of being a wicked, lazy servant, because instead of hiding the one talent he should have used it to produce more wealth for his master, as the other servants did: “Thou wicked and slouthfull seruant, thou knewest that I reape where I sowed not, and gather where I haue not strawed” (King James: Matthew 25:26). As a consequence, the Lord decides not only to take away his one talent and give it to the first servant, but also to prevent him from ever again being trusted and allowed to compete with others:

Take therefore the talent from him, and giue it vnto him which hath ten talents./For vnto euery one that hath shall be giuen, and he shall haue abundance: but from him that hath not, shal be taken away, euen that which he hath./And cast yee the vnprofitable seruant into outer darkenesse, there shall be weeping and gnashing of teeth.

(King James: Matthew 28–30)

Right from the beginning of the story, Matthew points out that the status of people (servants) is different specifically because some possess properties, wealth, or mental/physical abilities that others do not. And at the end of the story, Matthew elaborates and clarifies his message by emphasizing that those who possess talent (either wealth or the mental ability to be smart enough to invest, like the first and second servants) should be trusted, taken care of and given an abundance of opportunities by their social superiors (owner or employer – here, the Lord) – because only in this way can the superiors ensure their fortune and get some kind of return on their investments. Conversely, those who possess less talent (less or no wealth, or without the mental ability to be smart enough to invest) cannot and should not be given either responsibilities or opportunities. In fact, they should be excluded from the abundance shared by their talented peers – because they cannot provide a return on investment for their Lord.

When Robert K. Merton published his 1968 article “The Matthew Effect in Science”, he had been thinking about the Gospel of Matthew, and especially how that concluding thought from the Parable of the Talents reminded him of the way the reward system within science functioned. In his observations of Nobel laureates, scientists who have both the intellectual capacity (talent) to conduct high-quality research and the ability to publish their results, Merton noticed that they tended to get much more credit when, for instance, they appeared on papers with less recognized researchers: “The world is peculiar in this matter of how it gives credit. It tends to give the credit to [already] famous people” (Merton 1968:57). He also noticed how some researchers got opportunities to put their ideas into practice (and attendant chances for public recognition), while others were left to struggle, and along the way had to give up their experiments and with them, the possibility of acquiring recognition:

It does happen that two men have the same idea and one becomes better known for it. F, who had the idea, went circling round to try to get an experiment for … Nobody would do it and so it was forgotten, practically. Finally, L and B and C did it, became famous, and got the Nobel Prize … If things had gone just a little differently; if somebody had been willing to try the experiment when F suggested it, they probably could have published it jointly and he would have been a famous man. As it is, he’s a footnote.

(Merton 1968:58)

Merton’s many observations of similar cases within science led him to his theory of the existence of a social mechanism in the scientific reward system (a social system with social structures) that seems to differentially affect researchers with disparate levels of ability or talent in the same way as the Lord differentially rewards his servants in Matthew’s story:

This complex pattern of the misallocation of credit for scientific work must quite evidently be described as ‘the Matthew effect’, for, as will be remembered, the Gospel according to St. Matthew puts it this way: “For unto every one that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance: but from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Put in less stately language, the Matthew effect consists in the accruing of greater increments of recognition for particular scientific contributions to scientists of considerable repute and the withholding of such recognition from scientists who have not yet made their mark.

(Merton 1968:58)

It is, indeed, an interesting thought that the one who has more, the one with the ‘talent’ – whether this means mental endowment or wealth – such as a Nobel laureate, each of the first two servants in the Parable of the Talents, or some other who has been recognized for his scientific or economic contributions, will receive more because he has a ‘talent’ and because of some social mechanism that seems to be triggered by his possessing it. Or, worded differently, being a talent or being talented, in the sense where it denotes wealth, ability, and mental endowment, seems to activate this social mechanism, which then “mechanically” generates more value and possibilities for the talent or talented individual. In contemporary talent management research, Rehrl et al. (2014) have recently shown the importance of this social mechanism in identifying, recognizing, and generating more in general, possibilities and opportunities in particular: “Outstanding skills and knowledge do only emerge after there is a social mechanism through which certain individuals are more or less collectively recognised to be experts in the field. Expertise is constituted as a socially initiated nomination by the experts’ constituency” (Rehrl et al. 2014:31).

In order to get a better understanding of how this mechanism functions, how it is causally related to the individual in his/her causal field (i.e., his or her situation), and why it seems necessary to explain the self-fulfilling nature of ‘talent’ as a predictor of social success, I must first elucidate what, specifically, a ‘mechanism’ is in general, and then continue to an explanation for this social mechanism in particular.

As Craver and Bechtel (2006) point out, there are four aspects of any mechanism, which they convincingly show using the example of a mousetrap. The phenomenal aspect is the effect itself (a mousetrap traps mice). The componential aspect is the components or parts that make up the mechanism (the platform, trigger, springer, catch, latch, and impact bar of the trap). The causal aspect is the way the components act and interact with one another, and, finally, there is the organizational aspect, which itself has spatial (the components’ shape, size, and boundaries) and temporal (the components’ order, ratios, durations, and frequencies) elements. These four aspects both define what a mechanism is and constitute any given real mechanism; with them, it is possible to identify a mechanism in the actual world and to determine its type.

Real social mechanisms are constituted by these four aspects even when analysed as embedded in social structures with macro and micro levels, and (on a micro level) as having certain causal effects on social processes. Notions of effect, components, causality, and order (regularity and duration) are even to be found in Merton’s own definition of a social mechanism as a social process which has designated consequences for designated parts of the social structure (Calhoun 2010). This is also the case for many definitions of mechanism within sociology. For instance, Bunge (1997) defines a (social) mechanism as being “a process in a concrete system, such that it is capable of bringing about or preventing some change in the system as a whole or in some of its subsystems. Note that […] mechanisms are not pieces of reasoning but pieces of the furniture of the real world” (Bunge 1997:414). Machamer et al. (2000) define (social) mechanisms as “entities and activities organized such that they are productive of regular changes from start or set-up to finish or termination conditions” (Machamer et al. 2000:3). For Hedström (2005), mechanisms

consist of entities (with their properties) and the activities that these entities engage in, either by themselves or in concert with other entities. These activities bring about change, and the type of change brought about depends on the properties of the entities and the way in which they are linked to one another. A social mechanism, as here defined, describes a constellation of entities and activities that are organized such that they regularly bring about a type of outcome.

(Hedström 2005:25)

Even for Elster (1999), mechanisms are something that are “frequently occurring and easily recognizable causal patterns that are triggered under generally unknown conditions” (Hedström 2005:25). Little (1991) emphasizes that “a causal mechanism, then, is a series of events governed by lawlike regularities that lead from the explanans to the explanandum” (Little 1991:15).

With this in mind, it makes sense that Merton and likeminded sociologists attribute the differential success of Nobel laureates, and analogously of the three servants in the Parable of the Talents, to a social mechanism (Calhoun 2010). Merton even gives the mechanism a name: the ‘Matthew effect’.

Since Merton published his article about the Matthew effect and his theory of deviance, ‘opportunity structures’, and ‘self-fulfilling prophecy’, the Gospel of Matthew itself and Merton’s theory of the Matthew effect have become widespread in science and have profoundly influenced sociology, economics, sports, and education (Calhoun 2010, Rigney 2010). Within these disciplines, concepts like the ‘positive feedback loop’, ‘path-dependent increasing returns’, the ‘increasing return-effect’, ‘circular causation’, or even the ‘halo-effect’ all refer to social mechanisms that share the defining features of the Matthew effect, and which could have significant similarities with Merton’s theory. The idea of the Matthew effect has become especially widespread in the study of talent management: ‘literature now exists showing the Matthew effect in a variety of fields, including educational psychology, social sciences, biology, legal studies and sociology. Within the context of talent management, the research suggests that placing someone on a high potential list may increase their performance’ (Burkas & Osula 2011:4). Larsen (2012) demonstrates how focus in the late 1990s was on talented top managers and how the Matthew effect helped to explain why they were, and why they kept on, getting more. The reason for the success of the Matthew effect in talent management may well be that by explicitly differentiating those ‘who have more’ (and so receive ‘more’, thanks to the effect’s underlying mechanism) from those who have less (and so receive less), the theory implicitly provides criteria for identifying talented individuals. In other words, those who have more wealth, more skill, more ability, or a greater mental endowment will – again, thanks to the underlying social mechanism – receive more recognition, more resources, and better opportunities. This, in turn, means that they will be treated as having some kind of talent.

Within the world of sports, examples are often given of how this social mechanism functions, and how it affects the identification and selection of young athletes. For instance, young athletes who are born early in the year are often physically more developed than those born late. This means they have more strength, speed, coordination, and so on, which makes them more likely to be selected for regional and national teams and to receive recognition at an early age. To those wh...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures and Tables
• Preface
• Introduction: How to Read and Understand This Book
• 1. The Gospel of Matthew – The Saying about Talent and Talent Management
• 2. Stories about Individuals from the Darkness
• 3. The Need for Talent: The Origins of Talent Management in Business and Sports
• 4. The Language of Talent
• 5. It’s not about Talent itself – but about Detecting, Identifying and Selecting Talents?
• 6. The Etymology of the Term ‘Talent’
• 7. ‘Talent’ and ‘Talent Management’ as Accidental Designators or Empty Signifiers
• 8. The Accidental Term ‘Talent’ in an Anthropological Semiotic Perspective
• 9. The Denotation and Connotation of ‘Talent’
• 10. Final Thoughts: The Gospel of Matthew in Contemporary Talent Management
• 11. IQC Management – the Future Term and Language for Talent Management
• Epilogue – Niels Bohr in Talent Management
• Notes
• References
• Bibliography
• Index