The Passion Pay: Exploring Practices of Talent Exploitation

This inductive study seeks to establish a conceptual background for theoretical development regarding talent misuse in the context of small and medium-sized enterprises (SME). The two objectives for the goal were (1) to explore and build a list of unethical treatment practiced on young talents; (2) to establish new framework for the special context or refining the existing framework on employee mistreatment. For the first goal, an attempt was made to develop a list of mistreating behavior by collecting and analyzing cases of ethical disputes. Analyses on 64 cases of talent mistreatment, namely ‘passion pay’, was conducted to present a conceptual ground for further investigation. Then, for the second objective, this study has proposed an integrative approach for assessing these ethical elements. The ethical implications were discussed based on an assessment conducted using three theories of ethics. Finally, a cluster analysis further shows the emergence of three groups based on the mistreating behaviors. We observed seven different mistreatment behaviors under four categories of mistreatment practices. Additionally, the cluster analysis results imply that talent mistreatment may be rooted in work characteristics. Organizational size may provide some contextual reasoning, but the extent to which this factor interacts with work characteristics left unclear.