THE SIGNIFICANCE OF ORGANISATIONAL CITIZENSHIP BEHAVIOURS FOR TALENT MANAGEMENT ? THE EXAMPLE OF POLISH COMPANIES

Nowadays it has been already recognized that the primary source of organisational development is knowledge and organisation’s ability to learn. Those two sources refer to employees who generate knowledge and determine the extent and manner how to use it. Taking this into account we can say that today each organisation strives for having the best possible, that means talented, employees. In contemporary economy organisations undertake some advanced activities in order to: attract, identify, recruit, keep and exploit talented employees in an optimal way. Such advanced activities are the components of the process called talent management. Talent management has become one of the most important trends and concepts in the field of contemporary enterprise management. It results from the fact that this concept offers companies the opportunity to create business models driven not by cost effectiveness but by new ideas and developing their intellectual potential. The idea of talent management has become very popular due to permanent enterprises’ struggle for the best employees. The issues underlying the necessity to focus on discovering and using the potential of talented employees is the central point of Positive Organisational Scholarship concept. However, both research and practical experience prove that talent management is extremely difficult process and many enterprises are getting into trouble while trying to implement this concept. This situation results from the fact that talent management depends not only on material assets of a firm but also on several intangible areas such as: organisational culture, relationships between employees, the level of organisational trust that are difficult to shape and monitor. Over the past decades, researchers have observed that some specific features of employees attitudes such as: altruism, conscientiousness, kindness or carrying about organisation can be helpful in talent management implementation. These supportive attitudes of employees have been recognized and named as organisational citizenship behaviours. The examples of such behaviours include a wide range of different activities, starting from employees helping one another in difficult tasks or projects, and ending with showing off company’s logo during some charity events. Organisational citizenship behaviours are personal and voluntary. Moreover, they are not included into official system of payment and rewarding in an organisation. However, it is known that such behaviours support enterprise’s effectiveness and efficiency. Both talent management and organisational citizenship behaviours were among key research areas of the project in which the authors have participated. The paper is an attempt to present part of research findings of this project. The purpose of the paper is to investigate the relationship between employees citizenship behaviours and talent management both in theory and empirical research.