3 - A resource-based view of talent management

Summary

The opening chapter has introduced the field of talent management, its evolution, and the core practices it involves. In this chapter we take the resource-based view (RBV) of the firm and use it as a lens to explore and critique talent-management practices. We begin with a brief summary of the RBV and use this to highlight a number of implications for the talent debate. We then summarize some of the assumptions to identify nine tenets inherent in the talent perspective, and use ideas from an RBV perspective to challenge and critique this paradigm. This critique, we argue, should make us question the idea of “manageability” within the talent agenda. Many of the assumptions of a talent-management perspective are antithetical to the key principles and notions that underpin the RBV. We conclude by suggesting six developments to practice that should be made by adopting a more strategic RBV-influenced approach to talent management.

The RBV perspective

The RBV tries to explain how some firms are able to sustain competitive advantage, and as a consequence they can continually earn superior profits compared to rival firms (Rumelt, 1984; Wernerfelt, 1984; Barney, 1986, 1991; Dierickx and Cool, 1989; Conner, 1991; Kogut and Zander, 1992; Amit and Schoemaker, 1993; Peteraf, 1993; Teece, Pisano, and Shuen, 1997). The RBV locates these sources of advantage in the firm’s special assets and capabilities. These assets and capabilities have qualities, referred to as “isolating mechanisms” (Rumelt, 1984), that make it difficult for rival firms to replicate them and compete with the firm that has built these qualities. These isolating mechanisms include situations where:

• it is hard or even impossible to relate the consequences or effects of a phenomenon to its initial states or causes, and decision makers find it hard to understand the relationship between organizational inputs and outputs, referred to as “causal ambiguity”

• the set of decisions one faces for any given circumstance is limited by the decisions one has made in the past, even though past circumstances may no longer be relevant (path dependency)

• interconnected social relationships and macro- and micro-factors of a social system create new properties (social complexity)

• knowledge is created that is difficult to capture, codify, or transfer, and people may not be aware of the knowledge they possess or how it can be valuable to others (tacit knowledge)

• complex synergies exist between assets, infrastructure, or capabilities.