Human Resource Management in Nigeria: A Review and Conceptual Model

More than insufficient theoretical and empirical perspectives, the human resource management (HRM) literature in Africa has lacked a clear guidance regarding future research direction. Given paucity of research on HRM in Africa, we use Nigeria as the contextual focus to elicit the emerging dynamics of HRM practices and redirect future research. This chapter evaluates how HRM research and practices have evolved over the colonial and post-colonial era, identifies how current issues of ethnicity, gender, the nature, and scale of the informal sector and information technology have shaped the emerging challenges of HRM practices. The chapter reveals that in Nigeria, issues such as socio-cultural, ethno-religious affiliations, poor infrastructure, and institutional voids are compounded by the nature and scale of the informal economic sector which influences how HRM is practised in both the foreign and local organisations. The proposed Nigerian HRM model is deemed useful for purposes of setting an agenda for future research and organised data gathering to support and guide the flow of representative HRM policies and practices in ways that the founding goals of organisations are achievable through dedicated human capital investments and utilisation, and also for the inclusive benefits of international HRM practices.