Article Review by Saharudin Esa 26 Sept 2012 saharina1110@gmail.com Mathias Hoglund, (2012), “Quid pro quo? Examining talent management through the lens of psychological contracts”, Vol. 41 Iss: 2 pp. 126-142
Article Summary The objective of this article was to explore the direct and indirect linkages between HRM practices and human capital within a talent management framework. In other words is, the author intention was to examine how employee responses to HRM practices, mediate the linkage between HRM and human capital. The approach was applying the psychological contract theory as a lens to assess employee perceptions of the extent to which talent qualities are rewarded and the effect of such perceptions on employee-felt obligations to develop skills.
Research Result Mathias mentioned on the result indicating that HRM practices are positively related to employee-perceived talent inducements and that talent inducements fully mediate the direct relationship between skill-enhancing HRM and human capital which was not necessarily true. The questionnaire total response rate of 5.6% was just too low to be cascaded into realistic extrapolation. He should had been considering to collect sample from other alumni instead of Finnish business school alone. Moreover, it could be contended on the robustness of the sample. Mathias was focusing the sample from managers and professionals among the selected organizations for testing the theoretical framework which may not generalize to other organizational and cultural contexts. The result was arguably better if he could do the direct comparison between his data and the existing data on formal identification of talent in the sample organizations. This direct comparison might lead to a different conclusion which might or might not be in favour of his conclusion. However, from the limited sample and resources, he indicated