Next Chapter of the Performance Ratings Debate

No one with an interest in HR and organizational behavior is likely to have missed that there is a lot happening within the field of performance management right now. As covered rather extensively in a series of blog posts here in the fall, a pervasive trend over the last three or four years has been to get rid of the annual performance review (APR) and, most notably, the numerical performance ratings. The idea has been that this highly unpopular process, doubtful both in terms of accuracy and added business value, only takes a lot of time for managers and also is demotivating for basically all employees except the highest-performing ones.

Back in the fall, I cautioned that the scrapping of the APR – overdue and expected as it was – risked hiding the fact that the really difficult issue is still upon us. Because in reality, the task of evaluating employees’ performance has gotten no easier just because the ratings went out the window. And there is still a need to evaluate, if you e.g, want to differentiate some aspect of pay or benefits based on performance.

It should come as no surprise, then, that the “get rid of the ratings” movement has now encountered its first big backlash. In a study performed by CEB with 9,500 employees and 300 HR managers in global enterprises, it turns out that the scrapping of performance ratings often has not resulted in the expected outcomes. Most notably, the quality of the performance conversations that managers hold with employees often seems to drop, since managers have a harder time explaining what they are basing their judgements on and how, concretely, the employee should improve. This also tends to lead to lower employee engagement. What is perhaps even more conspicuous is that managers, while having significantly more time on their hands after the administrative beast of the APR is abolished, spend significantly less time on informal performance conversations with employees. The  drop, according to CEB’s report, is by an average of 10 hours per year.

What does this tell us? That once more a lot of companies have jumped on a bandwagon without thinking through the really difficult underlying issues. Some of those issues are:

• What should take the place of APRs? Are we dumping formal differentiation of e.g. pay altogether (only likely to work in very “elite” organizations where there really are very few low performers), or do we need a new system to ensure fair and unbiased procedures?
• How do we make sure that the additional time freed up by taking away the APR is used by managers to improve and enhance ongoing feedback?
• Have we made sure that managers have the skills and tools necessary to provide effective ongoing coaching and feedback?
• How do we handle the fact that managers will probably still be just as reluctant to handle performance deficits?

Instead, however, the focus has so far has been exclusively on ratings per se. And of course, they were an easy target to blame for all the deeper-seated problems with performance management. I fear we will now see an equally shallow discussion as the pendulum swings again: “Getting rid of the ratings was a mistake!”

Let us remember that there are good arguments to question the APR: The administrative burden of the process, its doubtful validity, its rigidity, and – not least – the inefficiency of feedback that is given merely once a year. However, just throwing it out is not going to solve any of the hard problems of performance management. Starting by going head-to-head with the above-listed bullet points is a better way to go.

 

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/therussiansarehere/

Skills for the Digital Age: Let’s Hear It for the Good Old T Profile

What kinds of skills and competencies are needed for the digital age? LinkedIn, industry press, and popular books abound with lists of things like “flexible thinking”, “learning agility”, and, of course, “tech savviness”. If you want to get beyond the usual catchphrases, however, it helps to try to discern some of the broader strokes in how work life is actually changing. One person who is great at doing so is Paul Evans, professor in organizational behavior at INSEAD Business School. When I listened to him at a talent management research conference in Copenhagen this past autumn, he brought up the following two megatrends:

• The modularization of work. To an ever larger extent, organizations are decomposing intricate work processes into its constituent parts. This is primarily driven by the technological development: Parts of the chain might be taken over by algorighms or robots, which is why it makes more sense to disintegrate heavy parcels of work into smaller pieces. According to Evans, this is also visible in the actual structure of companies: In recent years, large companies have increasingly adopted multidimensional matrix organizations, which were once considered too c0mplex but are now made possible by digitalization. This has two main implications for employees: They end up having several bosses, and they are required to develop effective horizontal collaborations in order to perform well.
• The diminishing role of authority. In this new type of complex organization, said Evans, it is seldom effective to rely on heavy reporting or managers telling people what to do. Especially when the primary product is knowledge and information, companies have a lot more to gain from adopting flat structures of peer production. We already see this in the tech sector with its self-organizing teams. What is important to note, however, is that this puts new demands on team members: First, the group as a whole needs to have enough knowledge to solve very complex problems on their own. Second, when there is little or no managerial steering, members need to be able to instead organize themselves according to social signals – meaning that social skills are more important than ever.

So, what does this mean for the skill set needed by tomorrow’s employees? Evans and his INSEAD colleague Eduardo Rodriguez-Montemayor develop their thinking around this in the report Global Talent Competitiveness Index 2017, which I have previously referred to. According to them, one could talk of a talent paradox: On the one hand, talent development is not specialized enough. Many employees lack the real edge that would make them hihgly attractive on the job market and could enable them to feed into cutting-edge knowledge work. But on the other hand, talent development is neither broad enough: People still work in clearly delimited silos and are not afforded the breadth required for effective collaboration.

In other words, in our “age of dualities”, as the authors write, there is no room for “either or”: People need to have deep, specialized skills and broad collaborative abilities. Perhaps surprisingly, a model of competency that is more than 30 years old turns out to summarize this very well: The T model, whose basic premise is that a well-rounded knowledge worker needs to have deep expertise in one area (the vertical bar of the T), in order to be able to really contribute to a creative process, but also broad collaborative skills and an ability to understand and communicate with people from other functions and backgrounds (the horizontal bar). The same idea was actually picked up by the European Commission’s Political Strategy Center in their report series EPSC Stategic Notes (no. 13, 2016). There, it was further pointed out that today’s education system falls short when it comes to helping the next generation’s talent to develop this kind of profile. Much more focus will have to be put on the application of knowledge and advanced collaboration skills, while still keeping very high standards when it comes to subject knowledge.

My guess is that we will see much more of T-shaped thinking in organizations’ talent management in the years to come, simply because it rhymes very well with the demands created by the digitalized knowledge economy. Who said an old model couldn’t be prophetic?

 

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/takomabibelot/

 

A Deep-Dive Conversation on Talent Management

Earlier this winter, I was invited to do a filmed conversation on the state of talent management, hosted by HR consultancy firm Assessio‘s fenomenal general manager Christian Walén. The video is part of the new series Assessio Insights, which focuses on research- and data-driven approaches to people management and HRM.

Sitting down with Christian Walén, himself a brilliant psychologist and thought leader in the field of I/O psychology, to discuss my favorite topic was a lot of fun. For those of you who speak Swedish, you can find the whole conversation here. For English-speaking readers, you will find a translated, somewhat edited, excerpt below.

The State of Talent Management and the Talent Concept

Christian Walén (CW): Kajsa, I think we can agree that few concepts within strategic HRM have been so much in focus in recent years as talent management. What’s the state of talent management today?

Kajsa Asplund (KA): I would say that most companies have realized the importance of the issues, and most have also implemented a number of talent management practices, such as an annual talent review. Maybe, however, we are starting to see an increased questioning some of the basic assumptions of the “war for talent” perspective.

CW: So the hype is over? We’re approaching a new phase for talent management?

KA: I think so. We’re approaching a somewhat more mature stage, I would say.

CW: Very interesting. When talking about talent management it’s very easy to just toss the concept around. But if I understand your research correctly, there’s rather a number of different approaches and talent philosophies out there in different types of organizations?

KA: Yes. Pretty early on, we noticed that companies approach these issues in quite diverse ways. There is, of course, some kind of consensus on the notion that talent management entails the chain of attracting, identifying, developing, and retaining talented people. But the definitions of talent differ substantially between organizations, and seem to be very much related to organizational culture.

CW: You have shown that in some organizations, the view is that everyone is a talent, and should be granted the right conditions and the right leadership in order to grow. Whereas in other organizations, there is a more competitive perspective saying that only a few should really be invested in. Is that the most common dividing line, or are there others?

KA: I would say that is probably the most fundamental dimension – how common is talent? And a related issue is of course; can talent be cultivated, or is it rather fixed to begin with? An additional dimension where companies differ quite a lot is the relative focus that they put on hard-numbers performance, relative to what you could call input variables: Motivation, ambition, drive, etc. Basically, what people call potential.

Performance vs. Potential

CW: Speaking of potential – does performance at one level automatically lead to performance at the next one?

KA: Definitely not. A pretty large proportion of those that are promoted run into problems. Of course, if you haven’t performed at the lower level it is pretty unlikely that you will succeed at the next one, but that should rather be viewed as a hygiene factor. There are a number of additional factors that could cause you trouble once promoted. For instance, the new work is often of a completely different nature – the classical example being the move from an operational to a strategic role.

CW: Or going from a specialist role to managerial responsibilities.

KA: Definitely. In addition, the weaknesses that you may have been able to live with at lower levels tend to become more visible the more complex the role.

CW: What’s really interesting about what you’re describing is that even though we have come quite far in terms of structures and processes, we now need a larger focus on the individual – to analyze and support his or her growth even more. Is that in line with your findings?

KA: Absolutely. I think many companies have hit one or another fork in the road by implementing the standard version of talent management, and then realized that we need to look more at what research is saying – what we know about how people actually grow and develop, what constitutes high potential, and so on.

Developing Talents and the Risk of Talents Leaving

CW: My impression is that a lot of talent management happens at very junior levels. Then it fades out further up. Is that in line with your findings?

KA: Absolutely. Over the last decade, companies have become increasingly focused on their employer brands. Related to this, they have invested heavily in finding these young high-performers to be put in junior talent programs, which are supposed to work as catapults towards higher positions. But when it comes to building the complex competencies that will be necessary in order to take on more senior roles, investments have not been as large.

CW: So what does talent development usually look like in practice?

KA: The most common version is to put these individuals in either a talent program or a passive talent pool, which basically equals a list of people that should be considered first when new career opportunities open up.

CW: So it’s the VIP lane kind of idea?

KA: Yes. The problem is, when talent programs finish, that usually becomes a pretty abrupt interruption for the talent. And there you really have a critical turning point.

CW: What happens with these individuals at that moment?

KA: Well, in research we talk a lot about the psychological contract, which is basically the employee’s perception of what am I supposed to do and what can I expect in return from the organization. What happens after a talent nomination is that the organization has effectively re-negotiated the psychological contract. Quite simply, the employee now has higher expectations on what he or she will get in return from the organization. You have gotten this talent label and were granted access to a prestigious talent program. If then nothing happens within perhaps a year upon program completion, there is a big risk that you decide to leave.

CW: Is that what you’re seeing? That these high-achievers have a higher propensity to leave if there are not enough development opportunities?

KA: Absolutely. And then we’re back to: Identifying and developing junior talent – yes, quite a lot is being done there. But the question is; what is going to happen then? What is the journey supposed to look like after the first two years?

Criticisms and New Developments in Talent Management

CW: This is super interesting. What you’re doing here is to pinpoint a somewhat more sober and critical view on talent, which seems really wise. What other critique is being directed towards talent management and the way we work with these issues?

KA: One is the very basic question of whether we should at all use the term “talent”. I see increasingly more actors questioning this, because the word talent has a number of connotations. First of all, it is associated with fixed characteristics, which could lead appointed talents to start seeing themselves as crown princes or crown princesses that can passively expect rewards from the organization.

CW: You often refer to some very interesting studies showing that when real star performers switch jobs, they don’t necessarily keep on performing. What kind of fallacy does this reflect?

KA: It’s the fallacy of thinking that talent is completely independent of context. This emanates from the very individualistic American view on talent management. Now we are beginning to understand that there really is a very intricate interaction going on between the individual, the team, and the organization, where the fit might be better or worse. You may perform better together with a certain type of colleagues, within a certain type of culture, and so on. In short, a more nuanced picture is emerging.

CW: This really underlines the importance of working with teams and culture as part of your talent management.

KA: Absolutely. So far, talent management has been extremely focused on individuals – not necessarily in the sense of really understanding how individual engagement works, but in the sense that organizations have been focusing on finding certain individuals to lift up and put in new positions. Now, there is an increasing appreciation of the importance of integrating this with work on teams and culture.

A Guest Blog Post on Satisfaction vs. Engagement

Last week, I did a guest appearance on the startup company Clanbeat‘s blog, telling the rather fascinating story of how organizational psychologists turned their focus from employee satisfaction to employee engagement. This shift has turned out to be pivotal to our understanding of what actually drives performance and motivation at work. You can regard it as the background explanation of why engagement has become the talk of the day in management and HR.

You will find the blog post here!

 

 

Why Talent Pools Are Never Enough

How good are companies today at talent management? Well, most are rather good at talent identification. A majority of large companies now have rigorous processes aimed at finding high-potential employees. Many also have specific talent pools where these identified employees are listed.

Fewer companies, however, seem to have made the same investments when it comes to talent development. Arguably, this is quite problematic if you want ROI from your talent management. Imagine an FC Barcelona junior soccer scout vacuuming the youth academy for promising kids, and then doing nothing else than listing them as part of a talent pool. Identification without consecutive training is, plainly, quite a waste of resources.

Further, when companies do offer talent development, it tends to be in the shape of talent programs. That is; a time-limited, structured initiative, where chosen talents are gathered as a group to do various developmental activities. Common elements include trainings, rotations, mentoring, and project work (Stahl et al., 2012).

These programs, when well-thought through, can work really well (see e.g. Khoreva & van Zalk, 2016; Björkman et al., 2013). Nonetheless, there are two important points to be made: First, these initiatives only target a fraction of a company’s talents. Talent programs seldom have more than 30-50 spots, even in the largest corporations. Imagine a company with 10,000 employees. That’s 0,5 percent who get to enjoy a program. Second, these programs usually last about a year. In order to grow high-potential people into complex roles, development will have to continue well beyond that time frame.

Both of the above points actually lead us up the same alley: No talent development strategy can function without a substantial focus on on-the-job training (OJT), both for ex-program participants and for all the other talents in the company. This concept was put into focus by the consultancy CCL already back in the 1990s, but all too often it has been misunderstood. OJT, importantly, does not equal “being at work”. It is not about passing time at the office.

What research shows is that in order for OJT to be effective, it needs to be fashioned to get you out of your comfort zone. In other words, the job must feed you challenges that demand something beyond your usual repertoire. And as we also know from research, this can be quite stressful if not coupled with an intensified supply of support. That is; an attentive manager or mentor is usually necessary for these stretch assignments to work properly.

There is also another argument for OJT: Skilled employees want it. A number of studies have shown that good OJT initiatives reduce turnover intentions, and that the mechanism for this is an increased sense of support from the organization (e.g. Paré & Tremblay, 2007; Pattie, Benson & Baruch, 2006). There is also a positive relationship between perceived training comprehensiveness and commitment (Benson, 2006; Ehrhardt et al., 2011; Georellis & Lange, 2007).

If OJT is both effective and desired by talents – why is it not used more? Research is rather silent on this issue, but a qualified guess is that the number one reason is time-pressured middle managers. Organizations could certainly consider taking part of the budget from exclusive talent programs to give these key actors a bit more time to plan and execute high-quality OJT. Chances are, their talent development and –retention will benefit highly from it.

 

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/gabaus/

Nordic Countries Top New Global Talent Index

It is probably lost on no one  that talent – human knowledge, skills, abilities, and drive – has come to be viewed as a top competitive resource for organizations. The same however applies to the macro-level entities of society as well: The future prosperity of countries, regions, and cities will to a large extent hinge upon their ability to attract and retain talented people.

The top-ranked French business school INSEAD has realized this, and since 2013 they therefore publish an annual report called the Global Talent Competitiveness Index (GTCI). Apart from containing highly interesting analyses of various aspects of the talent issue, the report ranks both countries and cities according to their ability to attract, enable, grow, and retain talent. The 2017 edition was recently launched, and the reading is quite a delight for Nordic people. Not only do all of us rank in the top 15 (with Sweden coming in first as number 5); we also slay when it comes to top-ranking cities. Copenhagen actually tops the entire list, followed by Zurich, Helsinki, and San Francisco. Somewhat surprisingly, Gothenburg makes quite a jump and comes in as number 5.

You might wonder why the list is not completely dominated by the famous monster cities such as London, L.A., New York, and San Francisco. The reason, according to the authoring researchers, is that the report adopts a multifaceted view of talent competitiveness. The famous super hubs are very good at attracting talent, but less apt at the “enabling” and “retaining” parts. The European cities consistently come out as better at enabling talent, i.e., make it possible for them to deploy their skills and realize their potential. This has to do with aspects such as vast investments in ICT and R&D clusters. When it comes to retaining talents long-term, a bunch of smaller cities are the ones that come out as excellent. These cities have consistently worked on offering a great quality of life, including ambitious work with sustainability, safety, culture, and healthcare access. These, it turns out, may not be the number one factors that attract huge amounts of talent – but those that get there, tend to stay.

But in addition to this, why are the Nordic countries faring so well? According to the authors, a number of factors contribute. First of all, our societies were early adopters when it came to digitalization. Vast investments in ICT, coupled with our trust in institutions and far-reaching collaboration between the state and private stakeholders, paved the way. Further, we get credit for having kept our high focus on work-life balance and flexibility in working life; factors that are now increasingly sought after by talents. In addition, the report emphasizes the many benefits of free education and generous welfare systems.

So, can we then rest on our laurels? Not really, according to the report, which also identifies a couple of important areas where the Nordics need to speed up. Most notably, the authors lament the slow adoption of digital technology in our education systems, as well as the crazy housing market in our major cities. Lots to do still, in other words – but the report certainly represents a feather in our cap as a talent region.

The whole report can be found here.

 

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/99385036@N06/

Should You Tell Talents They Are Talents?

There are certain questions that keep coming back when I ask HR or line managers what they would like research to look into when it comes to talent management. One stands out as the most common one of all: Should you tell your employees that they have been identified as talents, and – indirectly – that others have not?

There certainly are relevant concerns that can make you hesitate about putting that crown on some heads and not others. For one, managers often worry that if you tell a high-potential person that he or she is a talent, the person will start resting on his or her laurels and stop trying – a phenomenon often referred to as the crown prince syndrome (Dries & Pepermans, 2008; Dries, 2013). There is also the fear that the talent nomination will create unduly pressure and stress.

Even more common, however, is the fear of how the non-selected employees will react (De Long & Vijayaraghavan, 2003). HR managers often worry that this group will experience feelings of injustice and envy, resulting perhaps in turnover or lower engagement. There is also a cultural aspect to this worry: In the Nordic countries, traditionally associated with values of egalitarianism, singling out a small minority as “better” than the rest is more controversial than in e.g. the Anglo-saxon world.

So, how do companies handle this matter? As it turns out, there is a large discrepancy between what you might call formal and informal transparency. Church et al. (2015), who surveyed 80 companies with well-established talent management practices, found that only 34 percent formally communicate talent decisions. However, out of the 66 percent that did not formally tell employees, 18 percent reported that managers tell employees informally, and 33 percent said employees find out on their own. Thus, only 15 percent of companies seem to have employees that do not know which ones are considered talents. This is well in line with a study by Campbell and Smith (2010), where 91 percent of surveyed employees reported that they knew their own talent status, but only 69 percent of those had been formally told. The rest had figured it out on their own, or someone had told them off the record.

Studies have also shown that there might be positive effects of being told that you are a talent. Björkman et al. (2013), for instance, found that employees who knew they were considered talents were the most committed to the organization. Furthermore, Campbell and Smith (2010) found that this effect was stronger for those that had been formally informed of their talent status. Less is known about the effects of a formal notice on those not identified as talents. In one of the few studies conducted, Björkman et al. (2013) found no significant differences between those who knew they were not nominated as talents, and those that had no knowledge of their standing. What has turned out to cause a lot of negative reactions, on the other hand, is when HR decision processes are perceived as obscure. A host of studies have shown that employees’ perceived justice is severely compromised when they do not understand how HR decisions have been made (cf. e.g. Sumelius et al., 2014, who looked at performance appraisals).

Once clear conclusion can be drawn from this: Whether you formally announce talent decisions or not, the vast majority of employees will still figure them out. Further, the rather few studies conducted indicate that the effects of a formal announcement might be more positive than expected by many HR professionals – but more research is needed. One thing that seems clear, though, is that ambiguity and secrecy about talent decisions is seldom the way to avoid potential adverse impact. The risk of negative reactions is much higher if the process appears as cloudy and non-transparent.

What this reasoning also boils down to is this: The core issue is not the informing part, it’s whether you should select some employees as talents in the first place. What is the strategic value of this activity? As long as you can answer that question clearly, it will be easier to dare to be transparent.

 

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/98004108@N03/

Talent Trends for 2017, no. 3: The Networked Talent

Welcome back to the third and final part of our list of trends and developments within talent management for 2017. If age and teams are topics that are entering organizations like waves, almost forcing talent managers to take them into account, this third trend could be viewed more as a large untapped possibility. The third trend, drums please, is networks.

It is almost a truism that social networks matter immensely in organizational life. Who knows who and who talks to who affects  information sharing, the distribution of power, and people’s careers. Your centrality in organizational networks should arguably also matter for your talent status: A person who is able to establish and maintain relationships with key people is much more likely to succeed than one who tends to remain peripheral. Still, network analysis has not reached talent management to any larger extent. Big data and the internet of things might now finally become the enablers. Take the very interesting study by Woolley et al. (2010), where employees were equipped with tracking badges to see how they interacted. The study elegantly revealed which colleagues people went to for advice (and for gossip) and how information spread in the organization. This type of knowledge is invaluable for organizations, since it identifies key actors.

At the annual academic workshop on talent management, organized in Copenhagen this past september, network analysis (the outcome of which might look like the chart in the image above) repeatedly came up as a potentially extremely valuable tool for talent management. For instance, HR could use it to identify those employees that are crucial nodes when it comes to e.g. linking different departments or groups of experts together. It could also be used for developmental purposes: A high-potential person who lacks the right connections will likely need to be coached, or his or her career will stall.

So there we have them, three broad trends on the rise in talent management in 2017: Age, teams, and networks. As you can see, the common denominator is the need for HR and senior management to start challenging some of the taken-for-granted assumptions about talent. The often implicit assumption that talent management is all about attracting and retaining young, individual stars and accelerate their career trajectory is ripe for questioning, and chances are this will be the year for it.

 

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/marc_smith/

Talent Trends for 2017, no. 2: Talented Teams

Continuing the list of trends within talent management for 2017 – and today, we have reached a topic that up until now has largely been championed by the startup and tech world. Over the past year, however, there have been numerous indications that this issue is gaining ever more attention in other sectors’ talent management, too. I’m talking about teams.

The word talent is not only associated with youth, as we talked about last time, but also with individuality. Most of organizations’ talent initiatives focus on identifying persons to be included in e.g. high-potential pools and programs. Arguably, this does not rightly reflect the conditions of modern work life in many industries. Most notably, knowledge-intensive work with high demands for innovation craves well-functioning teams. This is something very different from a mere collection of talented individuals. Remember the Groysberg studies, about the star analysts whose performance dropped when they switched jobs? Well, this did not happen for those analysts that took key parts of their teams with them (Groysberg, Eling Lee, & Nanda, 2008;Groysberg, Nanda, & Nohria, 2004). In other words, teams enable the deployment of individual capacities. Furthermore, they make members collectively transcend their individual capacities to reach higher. Much of the real top performing today is done by teams, not individuals.

Organizations, then, have everything to gain from breeding and maintaining high-performing teams. In other words, it is about time we started talking about talented teams. My prediction is that many organizations, not least professional service firms, will spend considerable time in 2017 rethinking aspects like incentive systems, assessments of potential, and development opportunities in order to better account for the team level.

 

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/brickset/

Talent Trends for 2017, no. 1: Age

A new year is born, and the blog is back to cover new developments and research findings within I/O psychology and HRM. The biggest focus will of course be awarded to my own  research topic, namely talent management. Although it has been almost two decades since the term “the war for talent” was coined, this is still a field where a lot keeps on happening from one year to another. So, what better way to start off 2017 than by looking into where talent management might be headed? I have taken to scientific journals, conferences, industrial developments, and my own conversations with managers and HR professionals over the past year to round up three broad talent themes that will most likely become increasingly relevant in the coming year. The first one out is a topic that can scarcely be avoided due to both demographic and legal reasons: Age. 

Traditionally, talent management has mostly been aimed at the junior segment of the workforce. Chances are that we will see this shifting in 2017. It cannot be lost on anyone that large parts of the Western world, and not least Europe, have an aging population. The seniors are healthier than ever, and many will want and/or need to work longer. Many of the late baby boomers and early generations X:ers will likely work well into their 70s. And on top of this we have the increasing legal focus on age as grounds for discrimination.

In other words, companies are facing a situation where age will need to be factored into the talent equation. For instance, is it always reasonable to put an upper age limit on your talent pool? This is not just a fairness issue – there are also important strategic reasons for wanting to include the older segments into talent management initiatives. If talent really is a scarce resource, few organizations can afford to say no to large pools of potential talent on such irrelevant grounds as age.

Still, there are indications that they do. Swailes and Blackburn (2016), for instance, showed that older employees had a smaller chance than younger of being included in talent pools. This is in line with research showing that age stereotypes are alive and well in organizations: For instance, we tend to consider older employees as less productive (Posthuma & Campion, 2009),  less willing to learn, and more change resistant (Ng & Feldman, 2012).  Transcending these stereotypes and the “think talent, think young” mindset is a major challenge that will likely increase its presence in 2017.

 

Photo: https://www.flickr.com/photos/20980483@N04/