High Potentials and High Performers in the Center of Talent Management

Abstract

Talent management (TM) has become a key area in HRM in the recent years. In the center of any TM program, there are talented employees themselves, even though currently there are significant differences in approaches to talents within TM. So- called talent tensions exist, for example, the object-subject, the exclusive-inclusive, the high potential-high performer, to name a few. In this work, the focus on the last tension with the following question to be answered: How often and in what way(s) are high potentials and high performers defined in the peer-reviewed TM literature. Therefore, as part of this systematic literature review, we examined 507 English-only articles and reviews published before December 31, 2018 in the Web of Science database containing the phrase ‘talent management’ in the topic field (Title, Abstract, Author Keywords, Keywords Plus®) to identify and analyze the conceptualizations of high potentials and high performers. The results show that a remarkable portion of TM articles are concentrating on high potentials and/or high performers, however, regarding the conceptualization, some differences are noticeable, which have significant effects on the operationalization and success of TM programs.