The Relationship between Talent Management Practices and Employee’s Innovative Behavior in R&D Units: The Mediating Role of Job Competency Development

Abstract

This study aimed to investigate the relationship between talent management (TM) practices and employee’s innovative behavior in R&D units and examine the mediating role of job competency development in this relationship. The study was an applied research in terms of objective, a field research in terms of data collection method, and a descriptive survey in terms of general methodology. The research population was the employees of established software companies based in Tehran, Iran. A sample of 219 employees was taken from the population of 509 employees working in 98 companies. The data collection tool was compiled from five standard questionnaires including the mentoring questionnaire of Dreher & Ash (1990), the strategic leadership questionnaire of Duursema (2013), the social media questionnaire of Zhang et al. (2018), the knowledge sharing questionnaire of Van den Hooff & de Leeuw van Weenen (2004), the career competencies questionnaire of De Vos et al. (2011), and the innovative employee behavior questionnaire of Kanter (1988). The validity and reliability of the data collection tool were established by face, discriminative, and construct validity assessment and Cronbach’s alpha and composite reliability calculation. After gathering the required data, they were analyzed by structural equation modeling and descriptive and inferential statistics techniques with the help of SPSS and SMART PLS. The results confirmed the presence of a significant relationship between innovative employee behavior and three of the four talent management practices (mentoring, strategic leadership, and knowledge sharing), which is consistent with previous reports in the literature. The results also showed that job competency development mediates the relationship of innovative employee behavior with these three talent management practices (mentoring, strategic leadership, and knowledge sharing) but not the fourth practice (social media usage). The results highlight the importance of the adoption of talent management practices to ensure reliable access to high-quality and efficient human resources and the possibility of promoting innovative employee behavior through these practices, specifically by identifying key positions and placing the right talents in those positions.

Keywords: TM practices, Job competency development, Employee’s innovative behavior