Who Are the Talents? Identification of Talents. A Review and Conceptual Framework

Over recent years there has been a significant research focus on the management of talent, however, there has been insufficient attention to the question of talent itself. This is a significant omission as how talent is understood and defined has significant implications for how it is managed in organizations. Our understanding of how individual human capital can translate to unit-level outcomes is also limited. Through a review of articles in the different sub-disciplines: talents, stars, high-performers and high-potentials, we offer guidance for those doing research on talent, incorporating an overview of conceptual debates, as well as the implications of how talent is defined for the type of research carried out. We suggest that authors address five relevant dimensions when defining talent: inclusive-exclusive, innate-acquired, transferable-context-dependent, subject-object and input-outcomes.