The Paradox of Flexibility and Security in Nigerian Employment Regulation: Implications for Human Resource Management Theory and Practice

This study theorises and empirically investigates the paradox of flexibility and security in Nigerian employment regulation and its implications for HRM theory and practice, addressing a critical tension between employers' need for workforce adaptability and workers' legitimate demands for employment security in Africa's largest labour market. Nigeria's employment regulatory framework, shaped by the Labour Act 2004, the Employees Compensation Act 2010, and evolving National Industrial Court jurisprudence, creates a complex and often contradictory regulatory environment for HRM. The study employs a jurisprudential-empirical design: Phase 1 involves systematic doctrinal legal analysis of Nigerian employment statutes, case law, and regulatory instruments to map the flexicurity tension. Phase 2 collects primary empirical data through 40 semi-structured interviews with HR directors, legal counsel, trade union officials, and employment tribunal officers across six states, supplemented by a survey of 220 HR practitioners on regulatory compliance behaviour. The Flexicurity Framework, Comparative Employment Relations Theory, and Institutional Complementarities Theory provide the multi-disciplinary theoretical grounding. Findings reveal that Nigerian employment law occupies an incoherent position: formally protective but practically unenforced, creating a de facto flexibility regime that benefits large employers at the cost of worker insecurity. HR practitioners navigate this ambiguity through a set of strategic compliance behaviours that the study conceptualises as Regulatory Arbitrage HRM. Original contributions include the Nigerian Flexicurity Index, a Regulatory Arbitrage HRM Typology, and policy recommendations for a coherent flexicurity regulatory reform agenda. Keywords: Flexicurity, Employment Regulation, HRM Theory, Labour Law, Nigeria.