Talent management practices: perceptions of academics in Egyptian public business schools

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to focus on 3 out of 24 business schools in Egypt in order to investigate their talent management practices of academics. Design/methodology/approach: A total of 350 academics were contacted and 245 of them were interviewed in 49 face-to-face focus groups. The interview length for each focus group is about 45 min and is conducted in Arabic, the mother tongue of all respondents. Upon conducting the interviews, the authors used thematic analysis to determine the main ideas in the transcripts. Findings: The authors did not detect any systematic approach for the management of academic talent in the chosen public business schools. Instead, there were irresponsible unorderly procedures undertaken by these business schools in staffing, empowering, motivating, evaluating and retaining those talents. Furthermore, the authors realized an absence of many cultural and technical dimensions like adaptability, consistency and knowledge sharing which may hurdle academic staff desires to do their best effort in teaching and conducting research. Moreover, these addressed academic members narrow perception of the concept “talent” that includes only musical and sports figures – the matter that reflects their lack of understanding for one of the hottest concepts in HR academic and practical arenas nowadays. Research limitations/ implications: The focus is only on a single perspective (academics) and a single area (Upper Egypt) – a matter that neglects a variety of views (e.g. minister of Egyptian higher education and schools’ deans). Additionally, the results/findings of this study cannot be generalized to academic settings in other countries because the data are collected only from public business schools in Upper Egypt. Originality/value: This paper contributes by filling a gap in HR management, in which empirical studies on the practices of managing talents have been limited so far.