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Introduction
The concept of strategic talent management (STM) has recently provoked a “significant research interest, as both large multinational enterprises (MNEs) and small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) are competing at attracting and retaining top-performing employees” (Cui et al., 2017, p. 9; Selmer et al., 2002). This development is underpinned by the notion that effective design and implementation of talent management strategies can be a key source of firms’ sustainable value creation (Scullion et al., 2010; Sparrow and Makram, 2015; Tiwari and Lenka, 2015; Tymon et al., 2010; Whelan and Carcary, 2011), leading to their long-term competitiveness in the global market space and their overall survival and growth.
In their review of empirical talent management research, Gallardo-Gallardo and Thunnissen (2016) found STM and global talent management as two key sub-fields of talent management. According to Collings and Mellahi (2009), STM refers to “activities and processes that involve the systematic identification of key positions which differentially contribute to the organisation’s sustainable competitive advantage, the development of a talent pool of high potential and high performing incumbents to fill these roles, and the development of a differentiated human resource (HR) architecture to facilitate filling these positions with competent incumbents and to ensure their continued commitment to the organisation” (p. 304).
Based on the literature reviewed so far, we are yet to see systematic reviews that exclusively focused on STM. It is essential to indicate that some reviews (e.g. Collings and Mellahi, 2009; Gallardo-Gallardo and Thunnissen, 2016; Lewis and Heckman, 2006; Thunnissen et al., 2013; McDonnell et al., 2017) were conducted on talent management. Although some of these reviews were general reviews on theoretical and conceptual clarification of the concept (e.g. Collings and Mellahi, 2009), others focused exclusively on empirical research (e.g. Gallardo-Gallardo and Thunnissen, 2016). Recently, Anlesinya et al. (2019) have provided a comprehensive review of the thematic and methodological domains of empirical global talent management. However, there is no comprehensive systematic review of STM research. Hence, the aim of this paper is to perform a systematic review on STM research (both theoretical and empirical papers) in order to map-out theoretical, methodological, contextual and issue gaps in the field with the aim of providing major insights for researchers in the area...