Inclusive talent development as a key talent management approach: A systematic literature review

Over the past decades, organizations have faced challenges in retaining good employees due to market competition and talent scarcity, thereby forcing leaders to improve their human resource strategies. Organizations often source exclusive talent development instead of nurturing talent inclusively. Exclusive refers to organizations' tendency to hire top talents outside their organization when needs arise, or if they have to look for candidates within the organization, only those identified as performers within their elite pool are selected. Literature suggests that inclusive talent development (i.e., career development via training for all employees regardless of individual performance) can complement management for employee retention. The present study carries out a systematic review of articles published from 1997 to 2020 pertaining to talent development, particularly inclusive nurturing, to enable frugal human resource management, i.e., developing human resource inclusive talent development (ITD) in a resource constrained environment. We address three major questions: to what degree is talent development (TD) represented in the wider talent management (TM) literature?; how does ITD contribute to individual talent growth and organizational performance?; and what are the limitations of current research on ITD? A total of 48 articles on TD, with 13 articles on ITD, are analyzed to provide theoretical and practical insights. This review presents research gaps on inclusive TD, and highlights future research directions, such as wider coverage to develop a more comprehensive scope, TD for low performers to improve their individual growth and organizational performance, application of frugal innovation through ITD, and association with resource-based view – valuable, rare, inimitability, and organized model (RBV-VRIO). While ITD coupled with other TM activities has significant effect on individual growth and organizational performance, the evidence for and discussion of this concept remains scarce. The research contributes to existing HRM literatures: (1) TD is a limited area of research and has minority representation within TM literature; (2) ITD is becoming increasingly crucial for individual talent growth and organizational performance towards a sustainable competitive advantage as primed by the RBV – VRIO model; and (3) key limitations of research on TD include one-sided perspectives to TD, lack of balance between individual talent growth and organizational performance, and other methodological weaknesses.