Fighting the War for Talent is Hazardous to Your Organization's Health
Abstract
Because we live in an economy in which all work is becoming knowledge work and in which intellectual capital is important for company success and, indeed, its value in the capital markets, there is an assumption that "the company with the best talent wins." This war for talent imagery overlooks the fact that it is often the case that effective teams often outperform even more talented collections of individuals, that individual talent and motivation is partly under the control of what companies do, and that what matters to organizational success is the set of management practices that create the culture. But it is not just that the war for talent is the wrong metaphor for organizational success. Fighting the war for talent itself can cause problems. Companies that adopt a talent war mind set often wind up venerating outsiders and downplaying the talent already inside the company, set up competitive, zero sum dynamics that makes internal learning and knowledge transfer difficult, activate the self-fulfilling prophecy in the wrong direction, and create an attitude of arrogance instead of an attitude of wisdom. For all of these reasons, even fighting the war for talent may be hazardous to an organization's health and detrimental to doing the things that will make it successful.Download Info
If you experience problems downloading a file, check if you have the proper application to view it first. In case of further problems read the IDEAS help page. Note that these files are not on the IDEAS site. Please be patient as the files may be large.Bibliographic Info
Paper provided by Stanford University, Graduate School of Business in its series Research Papers with number 1687.Length:
Date of creation: Mar 2001
Date of revision:
Handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:1687
Contact details of provider:
Postal: Stanford University, Stanford, CA 94305-5015
Phone: (650) 723-2146
Fax: (650)725-6750
Email:
Web page: http://gsbapps.stanford.edu/researchpapers/
More information through EDIRC
Related research
Keywords:References
No references listed on IDEASYou can help add them by filling out this form.
Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Rossen Petkov, 2010. "Perspectives On Disclosing Human Capital Into The Notes Of The Financial Statements," Analele Stiintifice ale Universitatii "Alexandru Ioan Cuza" din Iasi - Stiinte Economice, Alexandru Ioan Cuza University, Faculty of Economics and Business Administration, vol. 57, pages 29-40, november.
Lists
This item is not listed on Wikipedia, on a reading list or among the top items on IDEAS.Statistics
Access and download statisticsCorrections
When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:ecl:stabus:1687For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: ().
If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.
If references are entirely missing, you can add them using this form.
If the full references list an item that is present in RePEc, but the system did not link to it, you can help with this form.
If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.
Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.