Talent management and career development

Journal of World Business 49 (2014) 236–244

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Journal of World Business journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jwb

Talent management and career development: What it takes to get promoted Jo¨rg Claussen a,*, Thorsten Grohsjean b, Johannes Luger c, Gilbert Probst d a Department of Innovation and Organizational Economics, Copenhagen Business School, Denmark
Institute for Strategy, Technology, and Organization, LMU Munich, Germany c Institute of Management, University of St. Gallen, Switzerland d Economics and Management, University of Geneva, Switzerland b A R T I C L E I N F O

A B S T R A C T

Article history:
Available online 7 December 2013

Based on the talent management literature, this paper investigates managerial skills that are essential for managers’ job promotion. Using arguments from the human and social capital literature and following tournament logic, we claim that a manager’s own experience, expertise, and network size positively affect promotion odds, while strong colleagues decrease promotion odds. Studying 7003 promotions to middle management and 3147 promotions to senior management, we find broad support for our hypotheses, but find also that network size no longer predicts promotion to senior management. Our findings have implications for individual career development and talent management programs. ß 2013 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Keywords:
Talent management
Job promotion
Career development

1. Introduction
In recent years, talent management has seen increased attention from both managerial practice and academic research
(Capelli, 2008; Scullion, Collings, & Caligiuri, 2010; Tarique &
Schuler, 2010). While talent management was initially seen as summarizing a broad range of human resource practices (Lewis &
Heckman, 2006), a recent definition by Collings and Mellahi (2009) claims that strategic talent management describes an organization’s identification of key positions and, subsequently, the

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