A Longitudinal Investigation of HRM Practices, Employee Capabilities, and Organisational Resilience During Systemic Crises: Evidence from the COVID-19 Pandemic in Nigeria

This study conducts a longitudinal investigation of how HRM practices shaped employee capabilities and organisational resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic in Nigeria, using the crisis as a natural experiment for examining HRM's role in extreme adversity. The pandemic exposed significant variations in how Nigerian organisations across sectors navigated workforce disruption, talent retention, remote work transition, and recovery capacity, providing a uniquely informative empirical window into HRM-resilience dynamics. The study employs a three-wave longitudinal design: data are collected at the crisis onset, six months into the pandemic, and 18 months post-peak, from 28 Nigerian organisations and 620 individual employees across healthcare, banking, manufacturing, and education sectors in Lagos, Abuja, Kano, and Port Harcourt. HRM practice data, employee capability assessments, and organisational resilience indicators are collected at each wave using validated instruments. Panel data analysis, growth curve modelling, and qualitative case narratives from four focal organisations provide complementary evidence. Dynamic Capabilities Framework, HR Systems Theory, and Resilience Engineering Theory jointly provide the longitudinal theoretical architecture. Findings reveal that organisations with strong HRM system strength at wave one demonstrate significantly steeper resilience recovery trajectories by wave three. Employee adaptive capability, built through ongoing learning HRM investments pre-crisis, emerges as the critical mediating mechanism. Novel contributions include the HRM-Resilience Temporal Model, a Crisis HRM Intervention Taxonomy, and an Organisational Resilience Recovery Curve with predictive HR leading indicators. Keywords: HRM Practices, Organisational Resilience, COVID-19, Longitudinal Study, Nigeria.