Human Resource Management in Africa: Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

Africa is not a dream but in many ways, human resource management (HRM) in Africa could be a dreamlike experience. This appearance of managing in Africa as being surreal is particularly evident with many Western human resource managers. The sheer complexity and diversity found there can make the HRM process one of the more vexing decisions that management may have to undertake when doing business in Africa. In an effort to dramatize the complex nature of HRM decisions in African context, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland will be used as a metaphor throughout the paper. Just as Wonderland held many surprises for Alice during her adventure, Africa holds many surprises for Western HRM, not only in the form of the alien nature of the 'rules, regulations and laws' of many African nations but also in the extent to which many African organizations/employees ignore or bend the rules It is the intent of this paper to demonstrate a means to develop a classification scheme from which categories of African countries can evolve into more or less homogeneous groupings. These categories can then be used to develop customized HRM policies, strategies and tactics. The classification schema is based upon the European colonization of Africa, the history of leadership in African nations since decolonization, the economic/infrastructure development differences among African economies and the cultural differences among these same countries. It is envisioned that the African HRM decision matrix could provide the basis for making 'informed' HRM decisions by Western managers in an African context, although these Western managers must always be ever mindful of the Alice's Adventures in Wonderland nature of the HRM in Africa.