Decoupling as an Impediment to Effective Talent Management and Corporate Social Responsibility in the U.S. Real Estate Development Industry

This study considers why many U.S. real estate development companies struggle to implement talent management effectively, despite widespread recognition of its strategic importance. Drawing on semi-structured interviews and focus groups with 32 developers and executive recruiters, the analysis shows that industry-specific pressures encourage companies to develop entrepreneurial cultures that are rarely conducive to formal talent management programming. The resulting informality appears to create ambiguity about talent management goals, eventually leading talent management practices to become decoupled from espoused organizational values. The end result is the elevation of interpersonal “cultural fit” over systematic evaluation and the loss of opportunities to embed corporate social responsibility and leadership development into early career experiences. Bottom-up cultural acclimation processes can correspondingly narrow employees’ understanding of organizational norms, reduce alignment with long-term strategic goals, and weaken companies’ capacity to build future leaders. The study contributes a novel conceptualization of talent management decoupling in real estate development and highlights the risks of relying on symbolic, rather than substantive, talent management strategies.