The world has experienced dramatic changes in the past decade or so: borders have become less important and barriers for the movement of people and goods have been eased. Despite these fast changes, local cultures and traditions, historic roots and origins still remain important across the globe. In the rapidly changing global environment, regions and countries need to adjust and adapt to globalization processes to be able to survive, compete and lead in turbulent times of overwhelming changes. Talent management in the global environment focuses on developing the most effective configurations of managerial practices aiming to ensure a constant talent flow, to and within organizations, in order to enable them to sustain competitive advantages in the domestic and international markets within and across countries and regions. Those companies that have embraced the design, implementation and systematic development of their talent management practices have consistently achieved high efficiency and effectiveness in their operations.
Talent management is currently one of the most popular concepts worldwide. Yet, it is a management concept that has emerged only recently and the diversity of management approaches and practices across the globe leads to different talent management manifestations in various organizations. Moreover, different meanings and interpretations of the concept have emerged, which has created some challenges and divergent perspectives on its development. From a business and economic perspective, the ability to attract, develop and retain talented employees, interns, idea generators and implementers has become vital for companiesâ sustained domestic, regional and international competitiveness. The forces driving firms to develop their talent management strategies and practices are reasons that transcend national boundaries, such as increasing global competition, dominance of new global economic systems, emergence of new economic initiatives and regional economic alliances, industry consolidation, and the rapid increase in the number of multinational enterprises, which operate not only in local markets, but in any viable markets overseas. This inevitably has consequences for a firmsâ talent management. With increasing talent mobility trendsâessentially meaning that countries, regions and cities have no longer any unique claims to talented people who originate in a given home location, but are globally mobile and sought afterâtalent management strategies, approaches and practices appear to be of extreme importance for the long-term survival not only of individual companies, but even for regions and individual countries. This makes us turn our attention to talent management and its practices that on the one hand should reflect existing global experience, but on the other, need to be integrated and embedded in local contextual specificity. By drawing further attention to global talent management and its role in organizational success, it is important to mention that economic dynamics, regional-level strong competition and talent mobility across countries have given talent management influential power and transformed it into a vitally global issue for companies and countries. This fact pushes researchers, organizations and managers to discuss the key internal and external factors affecting talent management systems in different countries, to find adequate mechanisms for the adaptation of talent management to existing national cultures, to build talent attraction and retention tools that can enable firms to overcome the challenges of talent shortages, and to seek a balance between the advanced talent management practices developed by developed market firms and those aligned with a country -specific environment. From a global point of view, demand and competition for talent is getting more intensive. This makes it crucial for firms to develop sophisticated talent management systems that can act across geographical and cultural barriers, and which can convert global challenges into opportunities for innovation and creativity for the long-term success of a firm. Thus talent management can be seen as a mechanism and enabler of the long-term success of a firm.
The main tasks of global talent management include management recruitment, selection, training and development , performance appraisal and compensation, labor relations and career development of future managers that should be better explored and understood in culturally, historically and economically diverse environments. Talent management is nowadays partially discussed in more traditional textbooks on human resource management and leadership or on organizational behavior, where talent management is investigated mainly through the examples of human resource management practices of companies in developed economies . Some textbooks, handbooks and edited books have also reflected on the strategic issues of talent management showing the importance of the topic in general and offer examples of talent management practices of companies from developed countries, but rarely such from those in emerging market s.
In this book, we focus on companies representing contexts that have been neglected by researchers, but these companies and the countries from which they originate play an ever-increasing economic and cultural role in the contemporary world. We have based the contributions in this book on examples from the Asia-Pacific region, Central and Eastern Europe , Latin America and the countries of the CIS , thus creating a unique opportunity to enhance the understanding of talent management employed by companies operating in these regions.
By providing insights on the talent management strategies and practices of companies from the regions mentioned above, two main objectives are met. Firstly, the discussion of talent management incorporates a more region-specific perspective which, with the currently emerging and developing regional integration blocs, has gained greater significance. Secondly, unveiling unknown experiences of talent management in organizations from dynamic and fast-changing economies demonstrates the challenges faced by researchers in building a more all-round understanding of contextually embedded aspects of talent management. Many emerging economy companies have become global players in the past decade or so and, in doing so, they have created new knowledge, new experiences and new approaches to talent management, which make up one of the key pillars of their global rise. These have remained overlooked by mainstream researchers who often find it easier to focus mainly on firms from developed market economies instead of emerging ones, or/and on hard performance indicators rather than on soft issues such as talent management.
Organization of this Book
This book consists of four parts and each one of them represents a particular context. All parts have three main chapters bringing examples of talent management in firms from three individual countries. Each chapter starts with an initial discussion of talent management country-specific issues, which is followed by case studies highlighting key aspects of organizational talent management practices.
Part I presents an Asia-Pacific perspective in which the talent management practices of companies from China, India and Korea are discussed. Being in the Asia-Pacific region, these companies are heavily dependent on economic growth and cultural background. Country-specific talent management practices are elaborated on and regional trends that create a background for the effective management of talent are deliberated. Chapter 3 is focused on managing the talent market in China by exploring how Chinese companies create their competitive advantages through talent management strategies and practices adopted by leading Chinese companies. Chapter 4 presents the Indian cont...