Exclusive Talent Management: Examining Ethical Concerns and Boundaries

This chapter outlines frameworks commonly used in business ethics before defining Talent Management (TM) for the purposes of the analysis that follows. Traditional human resource management (HRM) fields include recruitment and selection, performance management, reward management, training, management development, and employee relations. Traditional virtues include honesty, justice, and courage, and by possessing these and other virtues a person can live morally well. In virtue ethics, actions are examined in terms of whether a virtuous person would do them. Organizational justice is an important theoretical mediator between TM practices and employee reactions. The ethics of HRM usually examine particular approaches to managing people. Models of talent development agree that talent in a wide range of domains is a combination of genetic endowment, individual factors, factors pertaining to childhood, environmental factors, as well as education, training, and practice.