THE ANALYSIS ON HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT ON ORGANIZATIONAL PERFORMANCE IN NIGERIA
Abstract
When schools are established, qualified teachers must be in place to prepare students for the acquisition of knowledge and relevant skills for world of work. Teachers therefore must be recruited. This paper looked at recruitment of teachers and their retention. It was observed that there are government agencies charged with the issue of recruitment but not retention. Proposals for retaining teachers were given. It was also noted that despite these proposals, some issues like non promotion when due, lack of accommodations among others, improved school organizational factors, inadequate teachers’ pre -service preparatory institutions are lacking. This research was driven by an interest in finding out if the demographic variables (gender; age education level) have significant difference on teachers’ willingness to stay on teaching profession. Three null hypotheses were formulated to guide the study. The study adopted the ex-post facto research design. The sample size was 50 teachers. Data were analyzed using inferential statistics – independent t-test and one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). The weight of statistical evident showed that demographic factors have a significant difference on teachers’ willingness to stay on the teaching profession in Rivers State, Nigeria. Based on the findings, it was recommended among others that employers of teachers should add retention packages such as ‘Golden handcuff’ to the existing ones in order to take into consideration demographic variables. it also recommended the need to step up teacher training programmed and control teachers migration.
Abstract
Hospitals in Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) face major workforce challenges while having to deal with extraordinary high burdens of disease. The effectiveness of human resource management (HRM) is therefore of particular interest for these SSA hospitals. While, in general, the relationship between HRM and hospital performance is extensively investigated, most of the underlying empirical evidence is from western countries and may have limited validity in SSA. Evidence on this relationship for SSA hospitals is scarce and scattered. We present a systematic review of empirical studies investigating the relationship between HRM and performance in SSA hospitals.
Following the PRISMA protocol, searching in seven databases (i.e., Embase, MEDLINE, Web of Science, Cochrane, PubMed, CINAHL, Google Scholar) yielded 2252 hits and a total of 111 included studies that represent 19 out of 48 SSA countries.
From a HRM perspective, most studies researched HRM bundles that combined practices from motivation-enhancing, skills-enhancing, and empowerment-enhancing domains. Motivation-enhancing practices were most frequently researched, followed by skills-enhancing practices and empowerment-enhancing practices. Few studies focused on single HRM practices (instead of bundles). Training and education were the most researched single practices, followed by task shifting.
From a performance perspective, our review reveals that employee outcomes and organizational outcomes are frequently researched, whereas team outcomes and patient outcomes are significantly less researched. Most studies report HRM interventions to have positively impacted performance in one way or another. As researchers have studied a wide variety of (bundled) interventions and outcomes, our analysis does not allow to present a structured set of effective one-to-one relationships between specific HRM interventions and performance measures. Instead, we find that specific outcome improvements can be accomplished by different HRM interventions and conversely that similar HRM interventions are reported to affect different outcome measures.
In view of the high burden of disease, our review identified remarkable little evidence on the relationship between HRM and patient outcomes. Moreover, the presented evidence often fails to provide contextual characteristics which are likely to induce variety in the performance effects of HRM interventions. Coordinated research efforts to advance the evidence base are called for.
Background
While Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA) is home to 12% of the global population [1], it employs 3.5% of the global health workforce to service a disproportionate 27% of the global burden of disease [2]. A majority of countries across the globe for which the health workforce shortage is classified as critical (36 out of 57) lie in SSA [3, 4]. Most SSA countries are not able to attain an average health workforce density of 2.5 per 1000 population as recommended by the World Health Organization (WHO) [5, 6] and half of the SSA countries have fewer than ten physicians per 100,000 people (while Western countries commonly have 250 per 100,000 or more) [5, 7,8,9]. The low workforce density and high workload in SSA especially impacts hospital [6, 7]. The shortage of supply to match demand further increases because of low retention rates among skilled health workers [8,9,10,11,12]. Implementation of human resource management (HRM) practices is needed to improve the situation for a depleted and overstretched health workforce, and patient outcomes [10, 13,14,15,16,17,18].
Research on HRM interventions in SSA hospitals have so far primarily addressed (human) resource availability, e.g., “head counts,” technical skills, and basic working conditions [19,20,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28]. These practices are often referred to as “hard” HRM [29]. Hard HRM refers to approaching employees as one of several categories of organization resources (e.g., financial resources, equipment) that influence organizational effectiveness and are mostly organization-centered and reactive [26, 29, 30]. Although hard HRM practices have shown to be related to improved performance outcomes (e.g., waiting time, quality of care, patient experiences) [18, 31, 32], broader HRM interventions are needed to sustain hospital service quality and retain a satisfied workforce [10, 24].
Soft HRM practices are more employee-centered and focused on work-environment. They single out human resources as most important and subsequently address training and development needs, tasks and roles, communication, delegation, and motivation [29, 33, 34]. In the last decade, especially soft HRM practices have shown to impact performance, sometimes in combination with hard HRM practices [25, 33, 35]. However, understanding and the adoption of soft HRM practices in SSA hospitals is limited [18, 36,37,38].
The growing evidence of the relationship between HRM practices and performance has shown to be complex and is frequently referred to as “black box” [39,40,41,42]. Dieleman et al. underline the importance of context when stating that a HRM practice may result in different outcomes when applied in different contexts, as contextual factors are likely to influence outcomes [16].
The current evidence base on effectiveness of HRM practices is mainly developed in particular research settings, namely hospitals in the USA and Western Europe. Next to the high variation within these settings (e.g., type of hospital, financial management, government), there are major differences compared to the SSA setting (e.g., low providers capacity, low economic status, challenging socio-cultural issues, demographic trends, high disease burden). It is therefore likely to have limited validity in SSA [34]. A first relevant and major contextual difference is formed by the combination of a disproportionally high burden of disease and health workforce shortages occurring in SSA contexts, which so explicitly outline the societal relevance of understanding the relationship between HRM practices and performance [43,44,45,46]. In addition, major cultural differences exist, as well as differences in public service infrastructures and operations [36], financial resource limitations, availability and quality of medicines, materials and equipment, disease prevalence, and health literacy [10, 34, 37, 47,48,49,50,51,52]. Rowe et al. highlighted the need to generate knowledge about the strategies to improve performance by HRM practices in low-resource settings and called for dedicated and updated systematic reviews [18]. Harries and Salaniponi underlined this by stating that “getting the most out of the already depleted and overstretched health workforce in resource-poor areas is a priority” [52]. This study presents a systematic literature review on the relationship between HRM and performance for SSA hospitals.
