The Evolution of Talent Management: From Broad Strategies to Integrated Succession Planning

We present two studies within the talent management umbrella. In the first, we explored procedural justice as an outcome of talent management strategies, with the mediating role of perceived fairness and the moderating role of gender. A survey of 100 full-time US workers yielded positive, significant relationships between the inclusivity of talent management practices, procedural justice, and perceived fairness. Further, perceived fairness emerged as a partial mediator in the relationship between the inclusivity of talent management practices and procedural justice. In the second study, we examined a specific type of talent management, succession planning. We explored the development of a measure that assesses employees’ perceptions regarding their company’s succession planning process, and provided initial predictive validity by examining the relationship between the type of succession plan and perceived organizational support (POS). We assessed 96 employees’ succession planning perceptions with an adapted model of succession planning, examining integrated and informal categories. The measure’s initial psychometric and conceptual fidelity, as well as predictive validity, were promising. Further, we found that perceptions of an organization’s succession planning process, specifically the level of integration, are positively related to perceptions of organizational support. Both of these studies represent a substantial addition to the literature regarding talent management broadly and succession planning, specifically.