Linking Perceived Talent Management Practices to Employees’ Psychological Contract: A Mediation-Based Systematic Literature Review

Abstract

 This paper configures the issue into perceived talent management practices; in the context of employees' psychological contract fulfilment: a systematic literature review with a mediation centered approach. This is a review for two realities that are coming together. Talent management has become a crucial part of an organization's competitiveness in evolving labour markets, first of all. Secondly, employees are judging employers by the implicit promises they make in regard to development, fairness, recognition and employability, and not just by the contract alone. Since the literature is scattered among the studies of talent management, psychological contract, cross-cultural management or employee retention, it seems that a systematic literature review is suitable as it will minimize ad hoc literature selection and make the steps of the theoretical integration more transparent, as this approach was used in other studies. The paper follows a systematic review design following management-review logic and the principles of PRISMA reporting, and management concepts prior to the formal screening window (2001–2025) were only considered if they were foundational works. A contextual anchor paper is the doctoral thesis of Qazi (2021) particularly relevant for the mediation results pertaining to individualism--collectivism and for evidence from the banking sector in Pakistan. According to the results, there was a positive relationship between perceived talent management and psychological contract fulfilment; there was a mediation effect of combined individualism-collectivism and collectivism (but not individualism); and individualists had higher mean psychological contract fulfilment than collectivists. The review concludes that perceived talent management practices are insignificant as standalone HR practices, but are more significant as signals of employee value. Perceived career growth, psychological empowerment, justice/fairness perceptions, and organizational talent labels-congruence with employee's self-perceptions are the strongest recurrent mediating mechanisms in literature. A new idea put forth here is that cultural self-construal should occasionally be theorized as a translator or boundary condition of mediation instead of simply as a mediator. The aim of this paper is therefore to propose a serial mediation agenda between talent signals, employee meaning-making and psychological contract fulfilment.