Determinants and Interactive Effects of Strategic Management Practices on the Performance of Civil Servants in Oyo State, Nigeria

Abstract

Government and public sector reforms have been given much attention to Strategic management practices in order to improve efficiency, accountability and service delivery. The fact that the performance problems persist in the Nigerian civil service, creates the necessity to have empirically supported evidence on how strategic management practices influences the performance of the employees and the organisation. The study examines the determinants and interactive effects of strategic management practice on the performance of civil servants in Oyo State, Nigeria. The research adopted a quantitative cross-sectional survey study design, and the data were collected through structured questionnaire surveying 1,069 civil servants in ministries, departments and agencies within Oyo State. Strategic Management practices were assessed on six dimensions and civil servant performance included service delivery, worker productivity, citizen attitudes, transparency and accountability, financial management, human resource management, employee commitment, and public image. Two dominating components that explained 60.84% of the variation were found using Principal Component Analysis with Varimax (KMO = 0.928; Bartlett χ² = 8628.432, p < 0.01). Canonical Correlation Analysis also indicated that strategic management practices and performance outcome have a strong and statistically significant multivariate relationship (R = 0.614, p < 0.01), which accounts 85.92% of shared variance. The findings suggest that there is a significant main and interactive effects of the strategic management practices on the performance of the civil servants. In finding the value of integrated strategic leadership, learning, accountability, and agility in improving the performance of the public sector, the study offers policy-implementable findings to governance reforms. Long-term and comparative designs should be explored in future research in order to improve the knowledge of causal dynamics within the context of the public sector.

Keywords: Strategic management practices; Civil servant performance; Public Sector Reform; Canonical Correlation Analysis; Governance and Accountability; Nigerian Civil Service

DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/18-2-04

Publication date: February 28^th 2026