Middle managers as key talent management stakeholders: Navigating paradoxes

Abstract

Middle managers are critical in talent management practice. Yet, their commitment to enacting organisational strategies and policies is often limited given their multiplicity of responsibilities and tasks beyond talent management. Taking a paradox lens and a multi-stakeholder perspective, we draw from 147 interviews with middle managers, HR leaders and talents to unpack two key paradoxes when managing talent: a short-term–long-term paradox and a function–organisation paradox. Our research reveals a range of defensive and proactive responses to these paradoxes, which leads us to develop a typology of middle manager approaches navigating paradoxes in talent management. This typology depicts features, tensions and examples of middle managers' approach to managing talent. We introduce the extent of intradepartmental involvement and interdepartmental collaboration as key features and illustrate spatial and temporal tensions underlying paradoxes. We conclude with implications of the (in)effective management of paradoxes in a talent context.