Modelling the Impact of Talent Management and Organisational Justice on Innovative Governance in the Public Sector

Abstract

The public sector in Nigeria continues to struggle with weak service delivery, low rate of policy innovation and employee de-motivation. The review of governance performance indicates that more than 60% of citizens are not pleased with the services of the government. The common allegations of favouritism, slow promotions and underutilisation of skilled personnel in ministries further undermine the capacity of the public sector to embrace new governance practices. Despite these challenges, limited empirical research has investigated the combined effects of talent management and organisational justice on innovative governance in the public sector. Therefore, this paper assessed how talent management and organisational justice affect innovative governance among civil servants in Southwest Nigeria. The study specifically focused on selected selected employees of the Federal Ministry of Education, Federal Ministry of Health, Federal Ministry of Works, and Federal Ministry of Finance. The study was anchored on the Resource-Based View and New Public Management theory. An explanatory research design was adopted and was quantitative in nature. The population consisted of 2,480 civil servants across the four ministries in Southwest Nigeria, from which 345 respondents were selected using a stratified sampling technique. The structured questionnaire was used to collect data and analysed using structural equation models (SEM-Partial Least Square, version 4.0). The results of the path coefficient in Table 4 show that the variables of the talent management and organisational justice have positive and significant influences on innovative governance in public sector. Specifically, talent management had the most significant influence (β = 0.451, t = 9.872, p = 0.000) suggesting that the effective recruitment, training, career development and retention strategies within government institutions have a greater influence on the level of innovation. This indicates that with appropriate management and development of civil servants, they are more likely to be able to bring and implement innovative approaches to service delivery. Furthermore, organisational justice also had a strong effect and was significant (β = 0.392, t = 8.214, p = 0.000). The results indicated that strategic talent identification, equitable promotion, and clear reward frameworks have a significant positive impact on innovative governance, particularly policy implementation, delivery of digital services, and problem-solving initiatives. This implies that fairness in decision-making, transparency and equitable treatment of employees has a significant impact on enhancing innovative governance. The study recommended the need to adopt merit based promotion, clear performance evaluation systems and organised talent development programmes in government institutions.