Introduction

Few people can have escaped noticing that ‘talent management’ has become the new, fashionable, buzzword (Athey, 2004; Gladwell, 2002). Indeed, in some organisations the Human Relations department has been renamed the ‘Talent Management Department’ (Economist Intelligence Unit, 2006).

Popular magazines, management conference speakers and business journalists over a decade ago talked about the war for talent. Many assumed there was an undersupply of talented people at all levels and thus organisations were in a competitive battle to attract and retain as well as develop these special, but crucial, people. They were thought of as the new generation who would be required to lead the organisation in the future and ensure its survival.

Some have disputed this concept of war. Others have become more obsessed by who owns the process of talent management. Far fewer have tried to define the concept of talent from a behavioural or psychological point of view. Hence it remains unclear what talent actually is, whether it needs special nurturing to last and what it predicts. For instance, is talent different from the non-cognitive traits discussed in Chapter 7 (personality) or the cognitive abilities examined in Chapter 6? If talent is not merely a new name for an old construct or set of constructs, what does it comprise?