Effect of communication in talent management practice on non-high potential outcomes

Talent management (TM) has become a popular management discipline in recent decades and is considered crucial for an organization’s competitive advantage. Non-high potentials (NHPs), who constitute the majority of an organization’s employees, experience the most disadvantages from TM practices; however, they are rarely studied in the TM literature. Moreover, how an organization communicates TM-related information to NHPs to mitigate the negative effects is under-explored. Drawing on social exchange theory (SET), the present study examined communication in conveying information related to TM effects on NHPs’ outcomes. Moreover, to clarify the underlying mechanisms, we expanded our study to explore how perceived organizational justice mediates the aforementioned relationship. A total of 181 public sector NHPs in Indonesia took part in a survey with an experimental scenario designed using a post-test. Causal mediation analysis indicated that providing an accurate procedure information before delivering an unfavorable result and delivering an unfavorable result followed by face-to-face feedback had positive effects on justice perception, organizational commitment, and job satisfaction in the respondents. Finally, all aforementioned relationships were mediated by perceived distributive and procedural justice. The results successfully explained the exchange resource function, an unexplored area in the literature of SET. Further, theoretical and practical implications are discussed.