Talent management practices and employee retention among professional workers in five selected government linked companies in Malaysia / Zarina Begum Ebrahim … [et al.]

In today’s global business environment, talent becomes the potentially powerful
source of competitive advantage. The talent management and employee retention has always
been brought up by researchers, top management as well as HR Professionals to address its
importance. Thus, the aims of this research are to examines the relationship between talent
management practice and employee retention among professional workers in five Governmentlinked
companies (GLC) in Malaysia. Five core talent management practices tested in this
study were performance recruitment, performance management, succession planning, training
and development and rewards and compensations. The population consists of 140 professional
workers from five GLC companies. Data have been collected by questionnaire and analyzed
using SPSS. The findings indicate all the five talent management practices have positive
correlation on employee retention. Meanwhile, the result of multiple regressions shows only
performance management and recruitment positively effect on employee retention. The
limitations of the study include a small sample size, (N= 140) and was not longitudinal in nature
and could be limited to generalizability to other samples. This study is significant for HR
practitioners in setting the direction for future research in the area of talent management and
help managers understand the significant roles of talent perception to design employee retention
policies that are evidence based because the most potent action HR managers can take to ensure
their strategic contribution is to develop a measurement system that convincingly showcases
HR’s impact on business performance. Future study also should incorporate a more strategic
and holistic approach of investigation to include talent identification, talent development and
talent management culture as important contributors to talent management competency.