Complementarity in Talent and Workforce Engagement

The delivery of added value from complementarity will depend on talented people in a workforce that is fully engaged with the organisation’s vision or mission. In this respect, complementarity results from the interaction of business strategy and management practice—through people—which produces superior outcomes over those that would occur if such strategies or practices had taken place independently of one another. Ideally progression through complementarity would result from an organisational structure that facilitates its execution and a culture that recognises its benefits—a culture of collaboration and cross domain cooperation. This will require deliberate strategies on the one hand, and leaders and managers who have skills to be effective in such an environment on the other. However, neither will be able to deliver the benefits without a third element consisting of talent management and employee or workforce engagement, where the activities of talent management, when combined with and complementary to the activities of employee engagement, produce more than the sum of the benefits of each when treated as singular events. In this context, employee engagement refers to an individual; and workforce engagement applies to the totality of employees in an organisation. Talent management can be exclusive, inclusive, or pluralistic in nature. The complementarities will occur between the two functions and between these and organisational performance.