Implementing Sustainable Talent Management in a Mission‐Driven SME : The Roles of Organizational Signaling and Managerial Agency

In response to triple‐bottom‐line sustainability challenges facing the global business environment, organizations increasingly incorporate sustainability principles into their HRM practices, including talent management (TM). This becomes especially challenging for small and medium‐sized enterprises (SMEs). While sustainable TM has recently gained scholarly prominence, its implementation and outcomes remain underexplored in many organizations including SMEs. Anchored in signaling theory, we address this gap by examining the implementation and outcomes of sustainable TM in a French mission‐driven SME operating in the French Social and Solidarity Economy (SSE), where economic and social missions are intertwined. Drawing on a qualitative single‐case study of a French SSE‐SME, based on interviews with key organizational actors, we reveal that sustainable TM evolves as a value‐driven, human‐centred, and progressively formalized system rooted in everyday practices and ethical commitments. Second, signaling around sustainable TM was evolutionary and incremental in nature, shaped by senior leaders and HR actors. Third, we further found that managerial agency played a key role and was expressed through strategic co‐construction, managerial translation, and integrative coordination, connecting ethical purpose with operational practice. Finally, sustainable TM generates multi‐layered outcomes spanning people sustainability, HR system coherence, organizational performance, as well as environmental and social outcomes. We discuss the contributions to theory and practice of sustainable TM in SMEs and provide future research directions.