Talent Management in South Asia: Prospects and Challenges

Abstract

Talent management (TM) strategies are becoming significant to gain competitive and sustainable advantages through proper utilization of talent. The current study aims to investigate the concept of talent management along with its major strategies and to analyze the prospects and challenges of talent management in the context of South Asian countries. Using a comprehensive search of previous articles, the researchers critically reviewed the emerging strategies, prospects, and challenges of talent management. Particularly, this paper contributes to precisely defining talent, talent management, strategies of talent management, and its significance for the organizations. The study concluded that the significant challenges encompassing the talent management spheres of South Asian countries are many. They include a problematic process of identification of potential talent due to a shortage of skilled labor force, development and nourishment of talent by overcoming the bureaucratic and traditional management style, rife competition for the limited talent pools, non-existent of strong employer brand trend and ongoing brain drain. However, TM appears as prospectus towards South Asian countries as previous studies found that TM strategies contribute to improving financial and non-financial performance, employee productivity, degree of employee commitment, customer satisfaction and reduced turn-over rate.  Furthermore, after analyzing the prospects and challenges of talent management, this paper provides future research direction to conduct more research in the field of talent management.