Beyond Active Service: Nigerian Military Veterans’ Welfare as Strategic Human Resource Management

Abstract

Human Resource Management (HRM) scholarship has traditionally concentrated on employment relationships during active service. However, this dimension treats the end of employment as the terminal boundary of organizational obligation. This conceptual study challenges that assumption. It argues that post-employment welfare constitutes a strategically significant HRM instrument with theorized implications for institutional legitimacy and workforce sustainability. Based on the experience of Nigeria’s military establishment as an illustrative case, this paper develops a theoretically grounded conceptual framework that reframes veteran welfare from a social policy appendage to a strategic organizational asset. The paper integrates strategic human resource management, which situates HR practices within the competitive and institutional ambitions of organizations. Psychological contract theory, which illuminates how perceived obligations inform employee behavior and social exchange theory, explains the reciprocal dynamics underpinning organizational commitment. The analysis develops some theoretical propositions that link veteran welfare to recruitment attractiveness, employee retention and commitment and perceptions of institutional effectiveness. A conceptual model is presented that maps the strategic pathways through which post-employment welfare may generate organizational returns. The paper contends that organizations, military and non-military alike, that invest meaningfully in post-employment welfare are theorized to create a signaling environment that reinforces the psychological contracts of active employees, strengthens employer brand equity and sustains the institutional trust upon which long-term organizational performance depends on. The paper makes three principal contributions. The first is that it extends strategic HRM theory beyond the active employment period. Secondly, it offers public-sector and military organizations with a conceptual basis for institutionalizing veteran welfare within their strategic people management frameworks. Then, lastly, it establishes a research agenda for empirical investigation of the organizational returns from post-employment welfare investment.