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Introduction
The starting point of our study is theories involving the background of talent development (hereafter TD), which has been frequently used in the past two or three decades by management to increase the appeal of their organizations for potential employees, to retain them and to increase performance, productivity and competitiveness (Hedayati Mehdiabadi and Li, 2016). We share a common view of the process of TD with Garavan et al. (2012, p. 6) as:
“[…] planning, selection, and implementation of a development strategy for the entire talent pool in order to ensure that the organization has and will have a supply of talents in order to fulfil the strategic objectives and harmonize development activities with talent management processes”.
The process of TD is important for organizations, as it involves workers that are of strategic importance to the organization – they have a high level of competence, have high potential and often hold key positions. In a knowledge economy, this process increases in importance, since investment into human capital is understood as a long-term strategy which organizations implement to increase their productivity and competitiveness and keep pace with the current requirement for quick adaptation to technological changes through investment into development and education (Sparrow, 2019; Loon and Nachmias, 2020).
Although certain authors (Lewis and Heckman, 2006; Iles et al., 2010) believe that the relationship between human resource development (hereafter HRD) and TD is unclear and regard TD as merely a currently fashionable phenomenon which, in fact, uses concepts and theories that had already been previously used in HRD, other authors (Gallardo-Gallardo et al., 2013; Meyers and van Woerkom, 2014) approach TD as an independent research field. The present study considers TD as part of HRD focusing on development of workers in organizations. Without reflections on the development of theories conceptualizing TD (Garavan et al., 2012), it would be impossible to identify key developmental tendencies in TD or the related theories or their prevalence. Understanding how the process of TD is conceptualized helps us understand the phenomenon of TD process itself and define areas for further research into this field using alternative theoretical vantage points.
Over the past two decades, scientific publications have focused on identifying HRD theories and their re-conceptualization from the perspective...