Abstract

The nascent fields of talent management (TM) and global leadership (GL) share a common origin. Both emerged in the late 1990s, as management scholars responded to industry concerns about the global supply of human talent due to complex demographic shifts, rapid technological advances, and globalization (Bird & Mendenhall, 2016; McDonnell, Collings, Mellahi, & Schuler, 2017). This research almost immediately bifurcated into separate sub-fields based on different levels of analysis in research foci. TM research concentrated mostly on macro-level, organizational systems and processes associated with talent attraction, recruitment, remuneration, performance appraisal, and retention. Meanwhile, GL researchers tended to focus on examining the micro, individual-specific components of global human talent: global leaders. At the risk of oversimplification, TM research has generally focused on how organizations should and do structure processes to manage human talent while GL research has generally focused on what constitutes talent in individual global leaders and how that talent can be developed in individuals (McDonnell et al., 2017; Oddou & Mendenhall, 2018).