The dilemma of employee productivity measure and managerialism practices: An empirical exploration in financial institutions: Line managers and employee productivity measures

This empirical study explored how actors in specific human resource practices (HRPs) such as line managers (LMs) impact employee productivity measures in the context of Financial Institutions (FI) banks.
This cross-country study adopted a qualitative methodology. It employed semi-structured interviews to collect data from purposefully selected 12 business-facing directors (BFDs) working in the top 10 banks in Nigeria and the United Kingdom. The data collected was analysed with the help of the trans-positional cognition approach (TPCA) phenomenological method.
The findings of a TPCA analytical process imply that in the UK and Nigerian FIs the BFDs line managers’ human resources practices (LMHRPs) resulted in a highly regulated workplace, knowledge gap, service operations challenges, and subjective quantitatively driven KPIs, considered service productivity paradoxical elements. Although the practices in the UK and Nigeria FIs had similar labels, their aggregates were underpinned by different contextual issues.
To support line managers in better understanding and managing financial institutions BFDs productivity measures and outcomes, we propose the Managerial Employee Productivity Operational Definition’ (MePoD) framework as part of their toolkit. This study will be helpful for banking sectors, their regulators, policymakers, other financial institutions’ industry stakeholders, and future researchers in the field.
Within the context of the UK and Nigeria’s FIs, this study is the first attempt to understand how line managers’ human resource practices impact BFDs productivity in this manner. It confirms LMHRPs result in service productivity paradoxical elements with perceived or lost productivity implications.