Conceptualisation of talent and competence
Talent and competence based human resource management is an approach to managing
people that incorporates talent and competency criteria in decision making, choice of
techniques and activities affecting different areas of human resource management func-
tions and practices.
What is talent?
Shoemaker (1994) in Shoemaker & Jonker (2005: 506) defines ‘talent as above average
gift-ness towards a task through which an employee creates added value in his or her
work’. The implication is that, within the context of organisations, jobs and tasks, talent
is a gift which an employee may or may not have and will define the extent to which
organisations can excel through excellently done jobs and tasks. That excellence has to
come from employees with excellent talents. This perspective would suggest that ‘tal-
ent’ is something that belongs to an individual and which has to be explored, developed
and utilised by managers. The task of the manager is to identify individuals with ‘excep-
tional gifts’ or those with potential attract and reorient them to fit the organisational
context. Similarly, Buckingham (2006) looks at a talent as something that has to be
valuable to the performance of the individual and an organisation. However, he avoids
the use of the word ‘gift’, perhaps because someone may ‘lack’ a ‘clearly observable
gift’ but possesses the potential for development, one which can lead to rediscovering
one’s own talents (gifts), to develop and utilise them. Therefore, he defines talent as ‘a
recurring pattern of thought, feeling or behaviour that can be productively applied’. For
Buckingham, a talent has to be felt or observed. It is like an artist who can demonstrate
that art in speaking, writing, or playing etc. Once someone has that certain talent for art,
no one can take it from him or her. However, since it is possible for talent to be devel-
oped through training and development, undoubtedly, employers would hunt for rare
talents, nurture, and develop them in order to give their organisations a competitive
edge.
Rothwell & Kazanas (1993) recommend that organisations manage talents strategi-
cally by adopting a holistic approach. This will involve a process of linking busi-
ness/organisational strategy with a clear talent management strategy. The talent man-
agement system will involve talent identification, attraction, development and reward-
ing appropriately. The main indicator of an effective talent management system is the
business’/organisation’s achievements in terms of results.
What is competence?
The concept ‘competence’ has been used in general management for many decades to
describe a set of attributes that lead to an employee performing better than others. Such
attributes constitute ‘talents’. The limitations of personnel management as a discipline
and profession of people management during the late 1960s and 1970s and the evolution
of human resource management philosophy in the 1980s have adapted and developed
the concept of competence in human resource management more professionally. It is
now common knowledge that human resource management becomes more effective
when a competence framework and technique is used (Horton 2000).
Spencer & Spencer (1993: 9) define competency as ‘an underlying characteristic of
an individual that is causally related to criterion referenced as effective or superior per-
formance in a job or situation’. This definition suggests that particular individual per-
sonality characteristics define what a person is and predict what he or she can do and