MBA5008 Business Research Methods Report Sample
1. Assessment 1: Annotated Bibliography
A research based annotated bibliography presented based on at least 20 research papers of interest to the research topic. Uploaded by each student to the Discussion forum (800 – 1000 words). This is then discussed, analysed and reviewed by every other student to demonstrate their critical thinking, analysis capabilities and articulation of academic discourse. Both the annotated bibliography and the discussions are to be marked.
2. Assessment 2: Research Report
The student will be asked to write a research project based building up on their annotated bibliography in
Assessment Task 1, articulating a research problem / question, literature review, analysis and discussion of the various issues from different perspectives and coming up with conclusions, solutions and recommendations.
3. Assessment 3: Group Based Presentation
The students will reflect on their learning through the discussion forums, present their findings and discuss each other’s reports in a rigorous and engaging academic discourse.
Please Note: All assessment submissions are due by the due date and time. Exemptions or extensions may be granted in extenuating circumstances such as for medical treatment etc.
Tutorials: Where a student is unable to complete a tutorial task, he/she may be given a chance to complete the task within a calendar week (7 days) of the due date.
Assessments: To pass the unit students are expected to achieve at least 50% in the Hurdle tasks and an overall mark of 50%. Students will incur a late submission penalty of 20% of marks awarded for each day he/she delays the assessment submission up to a total of 5 days.
Projects: Students will receive a grace period of 10 days late submission. However, they will be penalised at a rate of 10% marks awarded per day they delay the submission.
Note - For all assignments, the preferred layout is in 12-point Calibri, with 1.5 line spacing, 5 centimetres left- hand margins and bold headings. Whenever you use the ideas and arguments of other writers, you must make reference to the writers and their work. By acknowledging the work of others, you avoid plagiarism. The APA style requires a reference list at the end.
Solution
1. Abstract
The research aims to assess the role of talent management in small and medium enterprises (SMEs). The main reason for choosing only SMEs is because these organisations are facing immense challenges in attracting and retaining talents for a long time. They do not have clear policies and practices in place to encourage the growth of talents within. The methods have reviewed in detail the important link between talent management and innovation and the role played by human resource (HR) in attracting and retaining talents. The results have been drawn based on the previous articles found in annotated assessment. The discussion reveals that majority of the SME lack the expertise and knowledge on attracting and retaining talents. Moreover, there is absence of training and development initiatives and career prospects in SMEs that makes employees quit the organisation. Therefore, having a strong employer branding model is necessary that will help the talents to look forward to joining such organisations.
2. Introduction
Any service-based business-like retail, hospitality, healthcare and many more that deal directly with customers need to have talented resources that will increase competitive benefits and improve satisfaction levels of the customers (Chung & D’Annunzio-Green, 2018). Talent management especially for small and medium enterprises (SMEs) have been a constant challenge to attract and retain the workforce. Uni Assignment Help, However, this aspect is critical for the operations and to sustain the business in the long-term. Large organisations are better equipped to handle talent management with strong HR policies and practices, clear actions plans and good working environment along with compensation packages that attracts a lot of talent. On the contrary, SMEs do not have adequate resources to attract talent and also major investments are not done in training and developing existing skills. When a company has limited resources, the criticalness of retaining each hire is expensive and attrition will have big impact in SME.
1.1. Background of The Research
The main reason for conducting an extensive research on talent management especially in SMEs is because these companies face major talent acquisition challenge and difficult in retaining them. An SME needs a concrete talent management plan to be designed by in-house HR or external experts to avoid the challenges of recruitment, management and retention of talents. Various articles of the earlier assessment will be used in analysing how the researchers have interpreted the talent management element of SMEs and the proposed recommendations to improve the scope of talent management acquisition and retention. SMEs have better leverage over large companies to form better talent management pool due to small team sizes, less hierarchies and policies. However, the major gap identified in the earlier literature review that was performed is analysis of performance review was not done which also plays a key role in retention of talent management.
1.2. Research aims and objectives
The research aims to assess the role of talent management with specific highlight of small and medium enterprises.
The following are the objectives the research wishes to answer:
• To ascertain the link between talent and knowledge management
• To examine the importance of talent management in the field of innovation
• To assess the employer branding philosophy and its role in talent management process
• To have an insight of the tole played by human resource in acquiring and retaining talent management.
3. Methodology
3.1 Literature Review
• Challenges faced by SMEs linked to talent management
The main challenge revolving around SMEs is that most of the businesses do not have a dedicated HR department to take care of employees needs. It is the entrepreneur who oversees the HR and administration activities. This extends further to managing and retaining the top talents within the business. Most of the companies that were studied through various literature study indicated that most of the SMEs do not have adequate knowledge on how to attract and retain talents. Also, SMEs unlike large organisation have not set aside clear career progression plans and there is no fixed training and development programs. Trainings are performed on need basis like change in process, introduction of new policies, change in technology etc. Similarly, majority of the SMEs do not have an appraisal system and feedback is not provided often. Talented employees sometime lose the momentum to be creative or innovate as they feel their talents are not being explored. Thus, this leads to most of the talents leaving the organisation early or during the prime phases of its growth stage. Along with talent the knowledge also departs as both are interrelated. Hence, SMEs find it an expensive drill to start the recruitment process once again in seeking for suitable resources.
• Relationship between talent management and innovation
As stated by Mohammed, Gururajan and Hafeez-Baig (2017) talent management considers individuals as a key source of investment where they tend to innovate and develop products and services based on their talent capacities. However, it is essential to ensure that the workforce feel motivated and supported to form new ideas. This forms a main reason why talent management is a main player in the innovation process. Some employees in SMEs also create online groups where they can get ideas to innovate or share knowledge with employees from other organisation on common practices. SMEs during recruitment can look for potential candidates who have innate innovation capacities. These people are energetic, think out of the box, help other people in the process and are more streamlined. The new-millennium has observed the arrival of countless number of progresses in strategic administration-thinking due to the advent of information technology upheaval. Also, knowledge management is a key in such scenarios not just in terms of qualitative or quantitative, but the manner is which this is presented. Thus, talent represents a significant source of competitive benefit for many organisations. The talented individuals contribute immensely to the growth and success of SMEs that any other firm.
• Role of human resource in attracting and retaining talents
The war of talent denotes the growing intense competition to attract and retain employees especially in advanced economies where small number of workforces is available to replace the baby boomers. Since SMEs work on tight budgets, having a separate HR process is hard and it there is one, the HR is not experienced enough to plan a robust training agenda except the basic onboarding process. The employers to attract the best talents has to create a talent pool first and then match the jobs based on requirements. This way they need not spend time recruiting new candidates constantly, thus, increasing the cost. Regular feedback is necessary for people to know which areas of the business they need to concentrate more to arrive at the desired results. HR roles in business is not confined just with recruitment and retention, it involves more than this. They need to have strategic policies and practices that will positively engage the workforce. Frequent rewards and recognition programs are one way of inducing talents to be with the business. SMEs need to have frequent meetings and performance review session to understand employee concerns. This is possible for HR in SMEs than large firms since the employee size is small and it is easy to resolve the issues in the beginning stage.
3.2 Search Syntax and Database
In order to collect required information from the peer reviewed papers, different websites have been considered. At first search was made in different websites with search syntax “Talent management for SME”. Then search was made with syntax “Role of talent management in organisation” and lastly, “Role of Talent Management in SMEs” was searched. All these searchers were made in different literature database like google scholar, ProQuest and EBSCO publishing
3.3 Study Selection Process
In order to collect required literary evidence to perform the study, PRISMA framework has been considered.
Figure 1: PRISMA framework
As per the above figure, number of finally selected peer reviewed papers for study is 11. Initially, there were 320 papers from the different websites were retrieved to perform the study then after screening 11 papers were finally selected for the analysis. As the selection criteria of the papers, it has been considered that the peer reviewed paper needs to be published within last 5 years and it has clear presentation of the research approach and research finding. As the exclusion criteria it has been considered that those papers will not be considered which are not available freely over online. Those papers have been rejected which have no relevance to research topic. And lastly, those papers have been rejected which have failed to demonstrate any relation between the SMEs and role of talent management for the same.
3.4 Data Extraction Process
In order to collect data, systematic review of the collected literary evidences has been done and table has been formed to represent the summary finding of the paper.
This way all the data has been pooled and further statistical or thematical analysis will be done in later stage.
4. Results
The results are presented in the below table:
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5. Discussion
According to Krishnan and Scullion, (2017) Small and medium enterprises (SMEs) are the key contributors for an economy such as employment generation. Talent management is one area that has grown in importance in most of the businesses and has appeared as a major human resource challenge. From this research it can be ascertained that SMEs are inclined to apply a more informative talent management approach unlike large corporates. Growth is considered a key performance indicator for SMEs and this is classified through product innovation. However, there is absence of skilled workforce that constraints innovation abilities. Small business entrepreneurs have diverse growth prospects ranging from swift growth to short-term detachment. However, all this is hinged on how talent is categorised in SMEs and specifically on organisational lifecycle of a business. A universalistic model of talent management in SMEs was proposed, however, it has been identified there could be region specific variances in the human resource process that has not been examined in the research. Also, the research framework fails to answer whether talent management in SMEs in innate or acquired. It is proposed that the practitioners can assess the effort involved in acquiring or developing talents. Also, country specific factors can be considered and the origin of talent in defining the idea of talent management in SMEs.
As Chaudhuri, Hirudayaraj and Ardichvili, (2018) indicates talent management and development are pivotal for many businesses globally. Despite talent management becoming a global concern for companies, the problems vary based on the countries of operation. For example, Japan cites aging workforce as the major issue for shortage of talent. On the other hand, in India there is adequate accessibility of talent, however, the training and management of the talent to suit the domestic and international needs is a problem Thus, talent management is recognising, evaluating, growing and retaining talents for every business. However, this study overly relies only on three Indian companies attuned to specific sector which is IT. Thus, a generalised view on talent management could not be ascertained. Also, only one member per company could be interviewed, thus, preventing to get a holistic view from other employees like managers, HR personnel etc. The researcher can seek to look beyond India into other Asian countries like Singapore, Japan where talent management is in abundance and how these countries have been developing the activity. This will help the practitioner to find similarities and differences and benchmark the best practices.
According to Skamnopoulou, Stalker and Kohont, (2019) in the present times it is mainly employees and not technology or capital that will add value to the business. Most of the companies are substantially investing efforts and time right from the recruitment to training and developing the best talents. There is a main question of whether talent management is managing all the employee’s talents or it is nurturing the high performing employees. The talent is acquired at high-cost, however, organisations fail to align them due to ineffective policies or poorly defined job roles and practices. Therefore, it is important for organisation to think why the talents are leaving the organisation. It could be because of limited investment by SMEs in developing their skills. The owners also feel that skilled labour would further result in employees moving for better prospects. In Slovakia, the HR recognises and recruits talents based on knowledge and educational background like other organisation. However, they do not offer extensive training on the technical front. But offers soft skills training that will help them to communicate, share ideas and become more confident. On the contrary, in Poland talents are recruited with good packages and non-financial incentives. The company has clear rules laid on their selection and development criteria. Poland companies have difficulties getting low-skilled labourers for which they planned to contact technical schools.
New Zealand being a small country that is secluded from other countries face major issues in attracting and retaining talents in many organisations. The country has some of the large businesses like Fonterra, ANZ bank and other small and medium enterprises. New Zealanders are leaving the country for other greener pastures, thus, limiting the talent skills further. New Zealand needs to formulate better policies to attract and retain talented workforce. One way to end this issue is to create a talent pool in most businesses and deploy the best based on requirements rather than recruiting only for specific positions. This strategy will imply for segmentation within the talent pool. On an international level the talent scale has amplified and New Zealand is one country facing intense issues with regard to talent attraction. Thus, companies are requested to recognise every employee’s talent and offer training and opportunities for their skill to be realised (Ott & Michailova, 2018). Thus, future research is needed to examine how SMEs can conceptualise talent and create human resource management activities to handle the talent management crisis and its overall application.
As per Bish and Jorgensen, (2016) talent management is repeatedly recognised a critical challenging facing every organisation at present irrespective of size. The author states that there is definitely a visible demarcation of talent management out of the US especially in smaller companies. In Denmark all employees are told about the importance of talent management before they joined the companies. Some of the employees during the interview stated that internally talent management in their respective organisation involved personalised and career-oriented development initiatives. Based on employer branding perspective managers communicate organisational values and objectives to workforce through the company’s brand descriptions and behaviours. The findings have pertinent theoretical and real-world insinuations, as the value alignment between the external and internal talent management messages are significant for certain employees than the talent management initiatives. The research needs to recognise the aspects of the entrenched talent management message that are resourceful to workforce in diverse business and national situations. Moreover, this study reveals that strong talent management messages and employer branding can be extremely efficient in SMEs to attract talents. Similarly, employees’ insights of similarity between the optimistic and implied elements of the external talent management message and their individual experiences post joining the companies may have a better influence on employees’ attitudes and demeanours.
The research by Monteiro, et al., (2020) resonates the similar views of Bish and Jorgensen, (2016) regarding to employer branding. Employer branding is an idea that is used in defining a company’s reputation as an employer and the value each staff attains from this. It is important for organisations to stand apart from its rivals and for this purpose they need to retain and attract key talents. To attract key talents, many businesses started to used branding norms and methods in the HR process. Employer branding apart from attracting talents also highlights to employees the benefits of being part of the company. In order to create employer branding the top management must be part of the process to reflect on the company’s position to retain current talents and attract new ones. This study confirms that the execution of employer branding has benefits for organisation since it underpins confidence in leadership, retains talent, develops strong bond between employees and management. Thus, employer branding commences with defining the value proposition reliant on the basic needs and preferences of the employees that they intend to attract. However, the major limitation of the study was to find relevant secondary sources related to employer branding especially applied on SMEs.
This research emphasis the role played by human resource (HR) in mediating the talent management skills among employees. Most of the managers are result oriented and ignore to focus on talent upgradation. Thus, the focus on human resources has become a strategic question in most of the management network. Again, Slovakia has been taken to research on talent management where the survey results revealed that HR strategy plays a key role in implementing constant training and development programs to increase in-house talents. From the analysis it can be construed that HR involvement is more in large companies compared to SMEs in Slovakia. The HR in large companies examine the external settings and based on the changes modify the internal strategies. Therefore, it is important for the HR even in small enterprises to create and implement plans for securing the talent. This is because a wrong person in the process could jeopardise the situation for the business. When an organisation needs to grow and be present for a long time, it must invest in training and development to grow the skills (Savov, Lan?ari? & Kozáková, 2020). Only those employees that have undergone training on skills upgradation and acquire knowledge and expertise should epitomize human power. The main reason being the needs for each job are complex due to development in technology and changes in the marketplace.
However, Mohammed, Gururajan and Hafeez-Baig (2017) imply in their research that talent and knowledge management is a combined process that is required for increasing the performance of the business. Most of the knowledge are in tacit forms, therefore, when a talented employee leaves an organisation, knowledge also departs. Knowledge in such instances needs to be transferred to the next successor who may be part of the talent management process. Conversely, it is hard to measure knowledge application and acquisition. Talent management is seen as a total of a person’s abilities that comprises of intelligent knowledge, career experience and competences. Both knowledge and talent management are interrelated as per the findings. Thus, talent and knowledge management are a mandatory and appropriate condition for the innovative growth of an organisation.
Similar views are expressed in the research study of Widodo and Mawarto, (2020) where it has been found innovative behaviour apart from influencing organisational commitment is further impacted by transformational leadership and talent management. Talent and knowledge combined helps the employees to focus on better innovations within the business. Lack of understanding the process indicates dearth in training and development initiatives offered by the companies to individuals. However, SMEs lacks adequate funds to set aside for constant training and development programs. This sometimes results in absence of innovation in such firms unless an employee who already possess talents and knowledge on a specific area is encouraged through rewards. The performance of a firm, innovation, talent and knowledge management along with transformational leadership combined is what helps business to succeed in a competitive marketplace. Thus, talent management is designed to ensure that all employee every work phase is at their highest potential. There is also adequate flow of employees throughout the firm who contribute to the sustainability of the company’s competitiveness.
1.3. Limitations of the review
The major limitation here is that no direct primary research could be performed to analyse the actual responses related to talent management from different employees like HR manager, leaders and bottom-level employees. Also, analysing various companies could have produced better results. After analysing various authors work as cited in the result and discussion sections, another limitation is that no organisation or the researcher has discussed on performance review which forms an important aspect for retaining talents. Performance review and regular feedbacks apart from training and development is necessary for employees to be aware of their progress. Performance appraisal acts as an inducement regarding career progression, additional incentives or raise in pay.
1.4. Recommendations for future research
The future can also analyse the link between performance appraisal and talent management retention in all formats of organisation. Also, a review on large companies’ tactics for attracting and retaining talents would be an interesting area to assess. Real-world experiences and benchmarking strategies can offer better insights for the readers to comprehend the importance of this element. Also, a cross comparison of various continents like Asia, North America, Oceania etc. regarding talent management can help the researcher to widen the scope to compare how each of these continents view and apply talent management in their businesses.
6. Conclusion
Thus, it can be construed from the overall findings and analysis of various articles that attracting and retaining talents has been an incessant issue for SMEs. They do not have concrete policies and practices to encourage talents. There is also absence of career progression and training and development programs. All these factors make employee rethink of joining such companies. Hence, having a strong employer branding model is necessary for attracting and retention of key talents to remain competitive.
7. References
Bish, A., & Jorgensen, F. (2016). Employee perceptions of the talent management message: Case analyses in Danish SMEs. In Annual Meeting of the Academy of Management, 1-33. Retrieved from: https://eprints.qut.edu.au/98283/30/98283.pdf
Chaudhuri, S., Hirudayaraj, M., & Ardichvili, A. (2018). Borrow or grow: an overview of talent development/management practices in Indian IT organizations. Advances in Developing Human Resources, 20(4), 460-478. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/1523422318803345
Chung, K. L., & D’Annunzio-Green, N. (2018). Talent management practices in small-and medium-sized enterprises in the hospitality sector. Worldwide Hospitality and Tourism Themes, 10(1), 101-116. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/WHATT-10-2017-0065
Hasan, N. A., & Saufie, N. H. (2021). The Curvilinear Effect of Talent Management on Financial and Innovation Performance of SMEs. International Journal of Management, 12(1), 33-45. DOI: 10.34218/IJM.12.1.2021.004
Krishnan, T. N., & Scullion, H. (2017). Talent management and dynamic view of talent in small and medium enterprises. Human Resource Management Review, 27(3), 431-441. Retrieved from: https://e-tarjome.com/storage/panel/fileuploads/2019-02-06/1549443536_E10563-e-tarjome.pdf
Mohammed, A. A., Gururajan, R., & Hafeez-Baig, A. (2017). Primarily investigating the relationship between talent management and knowledge management in a business environment. In Proceedings of the International Conference on Web Intelligence, 1131-1137. DOI: htp://dx.doi.org/10.1145/3106426.3109444
Monteiro, B., Santos, V., Reis, I., Sampaio, M. C., Sousa, B., Martinho, F., ... & Au-Yong-Oliveira, M. (2020). Employer Branding Applied to SMEs: A Pioneering Model
Proposal for Attracting and Retaining Talent. Information, 11(12), 574. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/346786571_Employer_Branding_Applied_to_SMEs_A_Pioneering_Model_Proposal_for_Attracting_and_Retaining_Talent
Ott, D. L., & Michailova, S. (2018). Talent management challenges and possible solutions for New Zealand businesses. New Zealand Journal of Human Resources Management, 18(2), 19-32. https://www.researchgate.net/profile/Snejina-
Michailova/publication/331273066_Talent_Management_Challenges_and_Possible_Solutions_for_New_Zealand_Businesses/links/5d450c82a6fdcc370a76c1f1/Talent-Management-Challenges-and-Possible-Solutions-for-New-Zealand-Businesses.pdf
Savov, R., Lan?ari?, D., & Kozáková, J. (2020). Size of the Company as the Main Determinant of Talent Management in Slovakia. Journal of Risk and Financial Management, 13(3), 50. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/339761378_Size_of_the_Company_as_the_Main_Determinant_of_Talent_Management_in_Slovakia
Skamnopoulou, D., Stalker, B., & Kohont, A. (2019). Talent management in European SMEs: case analysis between Slovenia and Poland. International journal of human resource development practice, policy & research, 4(2), 45-64. https://northumbria-test.eprints- hosting.org/id/eprint/53715/1/IJHRDPPR_Vol_4_No_2_3_Skoumpopoulou_11.03.pdf
Widodo, W., & Mawarto, M. (2020). Investigating the role of innovative behavior in mediating the effect of transformational leadership and talent management on performance. Management Science Letters, 10(10), 2175-2182. http://m.growingscience.com/msl/Vol10/msl_2020_69.pdf
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