Conceptualizing talent in public sector municipalities

While talent management is considered a top priority among practitioners and constitutes a major research area, the actual meaning of talent still remains largely undefined. In response to a lack of clarity and empirical basis regarding the notion of talent, various calls have been made for exploring how organizations conceptualize talent, particularly in the public sector context. This article answers these calls by adopting a qualitative in-depth case study to explore how senior Human Resources (HR) managers in public sector municipalities conceptualize talent in practice. The findings illustrate how HR managers use a variety of conceptualizations of talent. We analyze and theorize this variation and the ways of conceptualizing talent using two conceptualization categories: non-contextual conceptualizations, which are general and related to official practices (i.e. talent as future leaders and talent as a general commitment and drive forward), and contextual conceptualizations, which are specific and related to informal assumptions (i.e. talent as Trojans and specialists, talent as individual agility, and talent as public service awareness). Points for practitioners Human Resources (HR) managers use a variety of conceptualizations of talent in practice. Two conceptualization categories – that is, “non-contextual” (general and related to official practices) and “contextual” (specific and related to informal assumptions) – help us understand this variation and the ways of conceptualizing talent. HR managers are only partly shaped by the particularities of the public sector context, and some of the talent philosophies held by HR managers do not align with the existing and official talent management practices.