The moderating influence of managers strategic thinking on the effect of talent management on organ- ization core competency

Article history: Received: June 27, 2020 Received in revised format: August 1


Introduction
Human resources are the key input for each organization and addressing issues related to this field is particularly important. Recently, organizations need to attract, develop, and retain, the most talented human resources in an organization, which is still one of the most important interests of organizations. The scarcity of real talented employees, the lack of effective and efficient human resources, and rising employee's expectations have increased the importance of talent management. Here organizations can use the idea of "War for Talent". If an organization wins the war, it will gain a lasting core competence that support the organizations to achieve competitive advantage (Seyed-Javadin & Pahlavan-Sharif, 2017). Organizations should therefore be able to identify, discover and retain talents and provide long-term development and training for their employees. Understanding within Human Resource Management scholarly community commonly maintains that the effects of Human Resources practices on organizational outcomes require a focus on holistic perspective of Human Resources systems. ( Hussein & Çağlar, 2019).The Dependent variable used in this study is an organization core competence. Core competencies have distinguished strengths that organizations have relative to other organizations in the industry, which provide the fundamental base for the provision of value added (Wheelen et al., 2020). Core competencies are the collective learning in organizations and involve how to coordinate diverse production skills and integrate multiple streams of technologies. It is a communication, an involvement, and a deep commitment to working across organizational boundaries. Few companies are likely to build world leadership in more than five or six fundamental competencies (Bani Hani, 2014). Core competitiveness is composed of business development strategies, leader of core products, and innovative products, which can result in the firm's excellent business performances (Yang, 2015). The importance of strategic thinking in organizations also considered in this study as the proposed moderating variable. Every organization needs new ideas, products, and/ or services to survive, also, need to come up with new ideas to prevent stagnation and even inexistency. Goldman et al. (2015) argue that despite the consensus on the need for strategic thinking, and the general advice that it should be nurtured by organizations; there is sparse literature on what organizations actually do to help leaders, managers, and others employed by the organization. Development of the managers' ability to think strategically, how they do it, why they do it, and the degree to which their efforts are important (Banyhamdan et al., 2020). Strategic thinking focuses on finding, support, and developing unique solutions, and opportunities to create and investigate new value by enabling a provocative and creative dialogue among managers and employees who can affect an organizations' direction. Strategic thinking is an approach of recognizing the fundamental drivers of a business and rigorously (and playfully) challenging conventional thinking about them, in conversation with others. Strategic thinking must consider competencies and skills, products and offerings, environment and industry, markets and customers, competitors and substitutes, and suppliers and buyers (CFAR, 2012). The research on the issues of talent management, core competences, and strategic thinking are the hot topics, particularly the relationships among these imperatives. Therefore, the main purpose of this study was to investigate the relationship between Talent Management and Core competence with the moderating role of Strategic Thinking in Saudi private hospitals.

Talent Management
Talent management is one of the most important and most urgent element of human resource management in the world and it is still one of the most critical issues in many large organizations (Shafieian, 2014). The definition of talent is still an issue that needs consideration, in spite of major studies that has emerged in the last years that pointed to the importance of maximizing the level of recruiting talented employees as a unique source of core competence and competitive advantage . Talent definition is argued, in terms of whether talent is innate or acquired and whether the designation of talent should be based on capability or performance (Thunnissen, et al., 2013;Morley et al., 2015;Aljawarneh et al., 2020). According to Michaels et al. (2001) talent is a key or a term for effective leaders and managers that can help an organization reach its strategic goals. Talent can be viewed from different lenses: capital, individual difference, giftedness, identity, strength, and the perception of talent (Dries, 2013a,b). Moreover, talent is often related to excellent performance or to unique skills and abilities. Based on the written works, talent refer to a natural ability, mastery of systematically developed skills, commitment and motivation, fit between an individual's talent and the work context (Gallardo-Gallardo et al., 2013).Talent management includes all the practices of human resource management, and usually refers to the sourcing, selection, deployment, socialization, maintenance and development of talented employees. Talent management have a cycle that includes three main areas: talent identification and absorption, talents maintenance, and talents development (Schweyer, 2004). Many recent studies concentrate on relating talent to strategic positions, jobs, roles, or intrinsic capabilities of employees. These studies analyses talent management in terms of positions talented employees occupy, and roles they play in an organization. The roles classify all employees in terms of effects a particular employee or job can produce, which have a direct and explicit influence on an organization's performance and thus, be regarded as crucial (Shahi et al., 2020;Mahasneh et al., 2020;Collings, 2014;Cappelli & Keller, 2014;Huselid& Becker, 2011;Becker & Huselid, 2006;Alshare et al., 2020;Alsafadi et al., 2020). Thus, it is significantly important to identify key positions within the organization (al-Bourini et al., 2020). This approach needs that organizations should differentiate employees in terms of tasks they fulfil or positions they occupy, and key positions or jobs that should be filled by high performers and capabilities (Collings & Mellahi, 2009).
Despite the fact that talent management can be classified in terms of multi criteria, the findings of Collings and Mellahi (2009) outline four different criteria to talent management: people, practices, position, and strategic pools approach, that highly reflects the scope and aims of the research conducted in the field (Al- Da'abseh et al., 2018). They defined talent management as activities and processes that involve the systematic identification of key positions, which differentially contribute to the organization's sustainable competitive advantage (Mahafzah et al., 2020). The development of a talent pool of high potential and high performing incumbents to fill these roles, and the development of a differentiated human resource architecture to facilitate filling these positions with competent incumbents and to ensure their continued commitment to the organization". Talent provides the people with the given ability to yield a noticeable performance in some areas of work settings and score a better outcome than people of the same age or experience or have the best personal performance in a consistent manner (Nijs et al., 2014). Talent Management is more than a new language for old HR work or just the next "hot new thing for HR practitioners and managers to get involved in . For many organizations, it has become a strategic imperative that extensively linked to human resource practices in organizations anticipating increasing business performance (Nayak et al., 2018;Katou & Budhwar, 2012;Farndale et al., 2010;).Talent Management is a strategic and holistic approach to both human resource and business planning or a new route to organizational effectiveness (Ashton & Morton, 2005).

Strategic Thinking
Based on the strategic importance of strategic thinking notion for organizations today, many researchers focus on it as a vital asset for any organizations. Strategic thinking requires managers to think beyond routine procedures in order to concentrate on intended long-term strategic business purposes (Salamzadeh, et al., 2015).According to Nuntamanop et al. (2013), strategic thinking is important for both strategy development and strategic management; meanwhile, it contributes to corporate outputs and profitability. Kazmi and Naaranoja (2015) points that employing the strategic thinking term means that the leader combines elements like analysis, exploration, understanding, defining a multi faceted situation and then develop action plans that will bring the greatest possible positive impact towards a pre-defined goal. Henry Mintzberg (1994), emphasizes that strategic thinking is not merely -alternative nomenclature for everything falling under the umbrella of strategic managementǁ (Al-Jawarneh, 2016). It is a particular way of thinking with specific and clearly discernible characteristics (Al-Omari, et al., 2020). Strategic thinking is a way of solving strategic problems that combines a rational and convergent approach with creative and divergent thought processes (Bonn 2005). According to Hanford (1995), strategic thinking requires development of thinking concepts, skills, styles, and techniques. Strategic thinking, according to Thompson and Strickland (1996), is analytical, conceptual, and visionary (Aljawarneh&Atan, 2018). They further add that thinking strategically requires knowledge as also analytical and synthesizing skills. Strategic thinking broadly defined as an essential part of strategy development, a mental, reflective, and issue oriented process that has the purpose to develop new strategies and that may happen before, during or after strategic planning. (Goldman, 2012;Heracleous, 1998;Liedtka, 1998). Strategic thinking is a conceptual, systems oriented, directional and opportunistic process that leads the discovery of new and imaginative strategies that are implemented as it is made. Mintzberg1999;Liedtka, 1998;Heracleous, 1998). Tovstiga (2010) states, "Strategic thinking process includes developing strategic questions, forming issues, developing insight using strategic analysis, assessing competitive landscape, and generating strategic options." Commenting on the ability to think strategically. Golman&Casy, (2010) defined the strategic thinking as: conceptual thinking, system-oriented, directional and opportunity-oriented which leads to new and imaginative organizational strategies. The goal of strategic thinking is to produce a strategy that is a coherent, unifying, integrative framework for decisions especially about direction of the business enterprise and resource utilization (Kamangar et al., 2013).A study by Tavakoli and Lawton (2005) concluded thatthe greater the sum total of strategic thinking and strategic thinkers in an organization, the more readily and effectively the organization can respond, to take advantage of new business opportunities being created by today's fast changing business environment Strategic thinking, could be defined as the general perception, preference and logic of inference in the process of strategy making and conducting (Salamzadeh, Bidaki, &Vahidi, 2018). That the strategic integration of strategic thinking is to be presented and has a positive correlation with future performance (AL Safad,2016). To measure strategic thinking this study depends on Liedtka (1998) model. Five elements used and analyzed to measure the level of strategic thinking, these are "having a system perspective, being intentfocused, thinking in time, being hypothesis-driven and acting in an intelligently opportunistic manner."

Organization Core Competence
The competitiveness of organizations is based on its ability to develop core competences in the long run (Alexander & Martin, 2013), core competencies are the drivers for developing innovative (core) products and/ or services that minimize costs and maximize speed more than the competitors (Yang, 2015). Competency is a set of skills, attributes, behaviors, techniques, knowledge and abilities that are directly related to successful performance on the work that are considered an important element for all employees in all managerial levels (Bani Hani, 2014). According to Wheelen et al. (2019), a competency is a cross-functional integration and coordination of resources and capabilities. They distinguish between core competencies and distinctive competencies. Core competencies are a collection of competencies that cross-divisional boundaries, is widespread throughout the organization and is something the organization does exceedingly well, while the distinctive competencies are core competencies that are superior to those of the competitors. An organization core competency is an organization's strategic strength. Core competency is what the organization does the best internally and never outsource (Whittington, et al., 2020). Barney and Hesterly (2021), in their VRIO framework of analysis, proposes four criteria to evaluate a firm's competencies; valuable, rareness, imitability, and organization. The concept of core competence is a complex and challenging concept, a strategic foundation for renewal, and a driving force behind strategic change, which motivate interests both managers and researchers (Barney & Hesterly, 2021;Wang et al., 2004;. Core Competency is a set of strengths, experience, knowledge and abilities that differentiate a organization from its competitors and provide competitive advantage. Employees should possess these qualities in order to advance business goals (Whittington, et al., 2020).

Study TheoreticalModel
The purpose of this study was to investigate the mediating role of Strategic Thinking on the impact of Talent Management on Core competence, this study was applied in Saudi private hospitals. The study model depicted in Fig. 1 based on three constructs: First, Talent Management-Core Competence construct. Second, Talent Management-Strategic Thinking construct., and the last construct is Strategic Thinking-Core Competence construct. Talent model includes five factors used to measure talent management (Philips & Ropper, 2009). Strategic thinking (The proposed moderating variable) based on Liedtka (1998) model that includes five factors used and analyzed to measure the level of strategic thinking. Core competence (The dependent variable), was measured by three factors adopted from Bani Hani (2014). The main hypothesis of this study is strategic thinking moderate the influence of Talent Management on Core Competence.

Methods
Based on various sources gleaned from the literature, a questionnaire based on five-point Likert scale with responses from1 (very low) to 5 (very high) was designed. The questionnaire was divided into four parts. The first part includes the respondents' demographic characteristics: age, education, position, and experience. The second part includes 28 indicators reflecting five factors to measure talent management. These factors are as follow: Attracting, Selecting, Engaging, Developing, and Retaining(Philips and Ropper's, 2009). The third part includes five factors used to measure the level of managers' strategic thinking, these are; having a system perspective, being intent-focused, thinking in time, being hypothesis-driven and acting in an intelligently opportunistic manner (Liedtka, 1998). The last part includes 15 items to measure organizations core competence adopted from Bani Hani (2014). The model of this study is an interpretive one and the study is an applied-descriptive research. The target population for this study comprises of all managers working in private hospitals located in western region of Saudi Arabia. By using simple random sample, a total number of (354) manager were selected from the targeted population. (310) usable questionnaires were received indicating a response rate of 88%. Focusing on a single industry enables the researcher to better understand the processes and practices, which facilitates comparison among firms (Tsikriktsis, 2007). For analyzing the collected data, both descriptive and inferential statistics have been used. In addition, One Sample T-test has been used for analyzing data and research hypotheses and for identifying the status of research variables; meanwhile, Confirmatory Factor Analysis has been utilized for measuring the specified model. Finally, Structural Equation Modeling (SEM) applied for testing the research hypotheses. Kolmogorov-Smirnov test (K-S test) also used for testing the normality of data. Furthermore, the research hypotheses have been tested using the Spearman Correlation Test after confirming the applied scale and in doing so, SPSS and PLS software are used for analysis. For analyzing data, the statistical correlation methods like linear regression have been utilized.  Table 1 shows the descriptive statistics measures (mean and standard deviation) used to answer the research questions. Less than 5 years 5 -less than 10

Descriptive Statistics for Study Variables
More than 10 and4.48 for system perspective, the standard deviation lies between (0.55-0.61),. The mean value for core competence variables were lied between 4.73 for unique resources and 4.51 for processes, the standard deviation lies between (0.41-0.51),The values of standard deviation means that the data was more concentrated or homogeneous because the level of variability or dispersion was smaller.

Model Reliability & Validity
Three measurements used to assess the study model construct. Indicator Reliability measured by reflective indicator loadings that should be more than 0.5 to shows item is a good measurement of the latent construct (Hulland, 1999). Cronbach's Alpha that evaluate the reliability of the items in terms of unidimensionality of a set of scale items. It's a measure of the extent to which all the variables in scale are positively related to each other, α > 0.7 (Nannully &Berstein, 1994). The second model assessment's measurement used is convergent reliability using average variance extracted (AVE)comparable to the proportion of variance explained in factor analysis (between 0 and 1) (Bagozzi & Yi, 2012;Fornell & larcker, 1981). The third model assessment's measurement used is internal consistency using Dhillon-Goldstein Rho (Composite Reliability: CR), that measures the reliability of the indicators where values are between 0 and 1. CR> 0.7 indicates adequate consistency (Gefen et al., 2000).  Table 2 show the values of indicator reliability values: reflective indicator loadings and Cronbach's Alpha, since the Cronbach's alpha coefficients for all the latent variables were found to be well above the accepted threshold value of 0.75 reliability was confirmed (Litwin, 1995;Churchill, 1991;Cronbach et al., 1965). The values of reflective indicator loadings of the latent constructs ranged from 0.701-0.954, which were greater than the threshold level of 0.4 proposed by Nunnally and Berstein (1994). Content validity was assumed because the design of the questionnaire was based on the well-developed models in this study and was discussed with about five experts who were senior managers in big government hospitals'. Convergent reliability of the model assessed using average variance extracted (AVE) that measures how well the items share variance in demonstrating the construct, as appeared in Table 3 the AVE values ranged from 0.514-0.628 are all greater than the threshold level of 0.5 proposed by Bagozzi and Yi, (2012) and Fornell and Larcker, (1981). Model internal consistency assessed using composite reliability (CR) for each first ordered construct used in the model, all the composite reliability values ranged from 0.813-0.940 this indicate that adequate consistency and the model can be considered reliable. These figures demonstrate a satisfactory convergent validity.

Model goodness-of-fit
There are various ways used to measure the 'goodness-of-fit' of the proposed SEM model. The measures of the 'goodnessof-fit' divided into three measures: absolute fit, incremental fit, and parsimonious fit (Hair et al., 2013). In this study, 12 indices were used as apparent in Table 3, which are commonly used by researcher (Hair et al., 2013). The results appeared in Table 3 show that almost all the measures of 'goodness-of-fit' indices were very good and satisfied the recommended values. Thus, these measures indicated that this model was acceptable and well developed

Hypotheses Testing
The significance and relevance of the structural model was assessed through PLS/ bootstrapping procedure. Table 4 represents the results of testing the structural links of study model.

Talent Management Influence on Organization Core Competence
Hypothesis (H1), was supported, the results shown in Table 5, indicate that talent management has a statistically significant influence (t=13.19, p< 0.001) on organization core competence (β= 0.277), which implies to accept the alternative hypothesis (H1) that talent management affects organization core competence.
The coefficient of determination of the Talent Management -Organization Core Competence construct (R 2 = 43%), which implies that the 43% of the total variance in the organization core competence is interpreted by talent management.

Talent Management Influence on Managers' Strategic Thinking
Hypothesis (H2), was supported, since the results shown in Table 5, indicate that talent management has a statistically significant influence (t=8.921, p< 0.01) on managers' strategic thinking (β= 0.339), which implies to accept the alternative hypothesis (H2) that talent management affects managers' strategic thinking. The coefficient of determination of the Talent Management -Managers' Strategic Thinking construct (R 2 = 43.5%), which implies that the 43.5% of the total variance in the managers'' strategic thinking is interpreted by talent management.

Managers' Strategic Thinking Influence on Organization Core Competence
Hypothesis (H3), was supported, since the results shown in Table 4, indicate that managers' strategic thinking has a statistically significant influence (t=6.73, p < 0.05) on organization core competence (β= 0.377), which implies to accept the alternative hypothesis (H3) that talent management affects managers' strategic thinking.
The coefficient of determination of the Managers' Strategic Thinking -Organization Core Competence model (R 2 = 47%), which implies that the 47% of the total variance in the organization core competence is interpreted by managers'' strategic thinking.

The Influence of Managers' Strategic Thinking on the effect of Talent Management on Organization Core Competence (Moderating Effect)
Results shown in Table 5, indicate that managers' strategic thinking moderate the influence of talent management on organization core competence(β= 0.637; t =11.58; p< 0.01), which implies to accept the alternative hypothesis (H4) that managers' strategic thinking moderate the influence of talent management on organization core competence.
The coefficient of determination of the Talent Management -Managers' Strategic Thinking -Organization Core Competence model (R 2 = 48%), which implies that the coefficient of determination increased as compared with the first model, indicating that the moderating role of Strategic Thinking contribute to explaining the Talent Management-Core Competence model.. Moreover, the value of path coefficient also increased.

Table 4
The results of the model using PLS bootstrapping procedures

Discussion and Conclusions
The purpose of this study was to investigate and examine the moderating effect of strategic thinking on the influence of talent management on core competence. The main findings of this study indicate that there was a significant positive direct correlation between Talent Management and Core competence, which implies that whenever the hospitals increased its efforts in focusing on talents in human resource practices, the opportunity of achieving core competence increase. The findings have revealed that there was a strong positive correlation between talent management and strategic thinking, which indicate that whenever the hospitals emphasize on using talents in its human resource functions, the opportunity of managers' strategic thinking increase. In addition, the findings reveal that there was a significant positive correlation between strategic thinking and core competence, which means that whenever the managers' strategic thinking increase, the possibility of creating core competence increase as well. Thus, it recommended to managers to encourage the level and quality of strategic thinking in their organizations and invest on the managers' strategic thinking as much as possible. Therefore, it is advised to use talent management practices in the organization to enable the organizations managers think strategically in Attracting, Selecting, Engaging, Developing, and Retaining talented employees. The key finding of this study was that there is a positive and significant moderation effect of managers' strategic thinking appeared in the influence of Talent management on core competence. Therefore, it is recommended to adopt strategic thinking practices in human resource practices that will lead to create talented people who can achieve core competence for the organization on the long run. The results of this study agreed with the findings of many different previous studies (Schreuder & Noorman, 2019;Cui et al. 2018;Tafti, et al., 2017), as they have emphasized a managers who concerning in talent management, according to some, strategic talent management means simply having a right candidate employee in the right job category. In addition, Strategic talent development is a valuable and priceless investment in the future of the entire organization. Strategic thinking can be considered as an essential core towards the development and the sustaining of core competences among organizations. Study by Bodaghi et al. (2014) reveals that strategic thinking, as an internal factor, affects the development and improvement of future organizational planning; meanwhile, strategic thinking positively effects the company improvements. Generally, it is imperative for every organization to align its talent strategy with its strategic thinking strategy to achieve core competences; hence, strategic thinking will be an effective tool to address the alignment issue for the organizations. Similarly, it will serve the purpose of talent management analytics as well, which will be used by management for data-driven decision making regarding talent. Finally, the availability of strategic thinking for measurement of talent management impact in core competences would enable organizations to study the efficacy of their talent management strategies and their outcomes.