Mixed signals: employee reactions to talent status communication amidst strategic ambiguity

Abstract

Given the sensitive nature of communicating talent status in an ‘exclusive’ talent management system and the complexity involved in simultaneously sending signals of exclusivity and inclusivity, some organisations avoid open communication and instead opt for ‘strategic ambiguity’ – intentionally maintaining an element of secrecy and information asymmetry. However, we know relatively little about the effects of this communication approach as a feature of the organisational context on the reactions of employees. Drawing on signalling theory, we examine the reactions of both talents and ‘B’ players on finding out about their talent status in the context of a company that adopts strategic ambiguity in its communication about talent. The data consists of 24 in-depth, qualitative interviews with individuals with experience of TM in a Finnish subsidiary of a large, US-based multinational corporation. The findings reveal that the contextual effects of strategic ambiguity in talent communication affected the reactions of talents and ‘B’ players in distinctly different ways, but had few long-term positive effects on the attitudes and behaviours of either group. These findings present important theoretical and practical implications for the role of communication and organisational context in employee reactions to talent pool inclusion and for talent management more generally.

Keywords:

• Talent management
• multinational corporation
• communication
• talent status
• employee outcomes

Acknowledgement

We are grateful to the Marcus Wallenberg foundation for support for this project. Thanks are also due to M for help with data collection and to the School of Management at the University of New South Wales for providing an enjoyable working environment for Jennie Sumelius to work on this paper in 2017–2018.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Since TM is directly linked to a company’s strategic capabilities, and differentiating between employees is a sensitive matter, our case organisation and all interviewees are treated anonymously, and we refrain from disclosing more in-depth details about the company.

2 We chose 12 months as the cut-off point since we judged that the TM system of the company, as well as views of talent status communication, would still be relatively fresh in the minds of individuals who had left.

3 We gave the interviewees the opportunity to be interviewed in Finnish or English (with the explanation that English was the project language). This resulted in six interviews being conducted in Finnish, and the rest in English.

4 To improve the readability of the quotes presented, some grammatical corrections have been made, and some quotes have also been translated from Finnish to English.