HUMAN CAPITAL MANAGEMENT AND EMPLOYEES PERFORMANCE IN NIGERIAN LOCAL GOVERNMENTS

Human capital has been found to be essential in any establishment, manufacturing and service organisation inclusive. In service organisations such as local government, which is the third tier of a federal system of government, human capital has been the bedrock of service delivery. The availability of human capital is of less an issue compared to the management of human capital because this often makes the difference in organisations. Employee sourcing, engagement, and disengagement are critical activities of human capital management (HCM) that influence employee performance as established in extant studies. This suggests that one of the reasons some organisations are high performers can be attributed to the human capital management approach. However, the growing deficiencies, incoherence and incompetence of many local government employees indicate that the existing human capital management approaches are ineffective and cannot guarantee effective and efficient employee performance. With extensive literature review on human capital management and employee performance, local governments in Nigeria were found to be indecisive in human capital management approaches and this has not driven desired employees‘ performance level. The paper concludes that human capital
management at the local government level in Nigeria is not well-positioned to drive employees' performance. To change the narrative of the unimpressive performance of employees at that tier of government, appropriate HCM approaches must be adopted. As a result of this submission; objective recruitment and selection, employees‘ professional and career development should be given priority.