Talent Development and Its Role in Shaping Absorptive Capacity in Emerging Market Firms: The Case of Russia

The overall ability to create and transfer knowledge is one of the main competitive advantages for companies from emerging economies and becomes their performance driver. As human resource development (HRD) and talent development (TD), in particular, aim to extend employees’ capabilities related to innovative thinking, creativity, and their key competences, which can be necessary for knowledge creation and development, TD can be associated with a firm’s absorptive capacity; however, their relationship remains underresearched. Although some studies claim about grounds for absorptive capacity, lack of analysis of absorptive capacity dimensions, specified as knowledge acquisition, assimilation, transformation, and exploitation, and its connection to TD in the emerging market context can be observed especially with the relationship to firm performance in Russia. We investigate the influence of TD on firm’s absorptive capacity in emerging market contexts, more specifically in Russia, and confirm the link between TD in Russia and knowledge assimilation, knowledge transformation, knowledge exploitation, and knowledge acquisition. We show the new perspective of talent management, in general, and TD, in particular, for HRD area, showing the leading role of TD in emerging market contexts that should be in a primary agenda for both researchers and practitioners