Talent Management: en studie av konceptets innebörd och värde på en allt mer konkurrensinriktad arbetsmarknad

Sammanfattning: The increased competition for talented employees is a new challenge for todays organizations to reach success and as a response to this challenge the term Talent Management was developed during the 1990s. Due to the relatively new concept there is still no generally accepted definition and the purpose of this study is to contribute with knowledge about what defines Talent Management and how it has been implemented at five different organizations in Sweden. We have used a qualitative approach and grounded theory as a method to collect our empirical data through interviews with HR employees from the participating organizations. The research questions asked are: How does the lack of definition influence organizations that are working with Talent Management? How does the organizations work with Talent Management as a concept? How transparent is the process within the organizations? By coding our data we identified three core categories that we based our analysis on which are The value and meaning of the concept itself, An including or excluding process and Transparency within the organization. The conclusion of the study is that the lack of definition does not influence the organizations work with Talent Management. What is found is that Talent Management preferably should be defined to fit the organizational context it is implemented in rather than developing a more general definition. The results show a range of perspectives and approaches of how the organizations work with Talent Management but it also shows that there is a lack of transparency within the organizations. The main concern of the participating organizations is to identify/attract and retain/develop their employees and this is the core of Talent Management. To further develop the concept our findings show that it is preferable with a well developed strategy to be able to increase the transparency between the HR department and the employees of the organization.