Two philosophically distinct approaches in staffing talent are evident in the current literature. One approach assumes that some of a firm’s employees are more valuable than others. Huselid et al. (2009) capture this approach with the use of alpha terminology, e.g., Type ‘‘A’’ players, Type ‘‘B’’ players, and Type ‘‘C’’ players. They also assign these same letters to the positions in the firm. For positions, ‘‘A’’ indicates the most significant impact on the firm’s strategy and its key constituencies and positions that offer the greatest variability in performance. For players (the employees),
‘‘A’’ indicates those employees who perform at the highest level of performance variability and offer the highest level of impact. The result of this categorization is that firms then would devote the most, but certainly not all, of their resources in their global talent management efforts to ‘‘A’’–‘‘A’’ combinations.