TALENT MANAGEMENT PRACTICES AND EMPLOYEE RETENTION AMONG PROFESSIONAL WORKERS IN FIVE SELECTED GOVERNMENT LINKED COMPANIES IN MALAYSIA

Abstract

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 Government-linked 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.  Future study 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.