**6. Implications for future HR research**

HRM research in the African context has adopted either a content approach [15, 57] or a contextual approach [22, 57] to analyse the effects of HR practices on organisational outcomes. However, not much is known about the process approach to HRM in the African context. Process approach connotes how HR is transmitted to the employees and how employee's perceptions and cognitions of those HR practices influence uniform understanding (the HR strength) and execution of HR goals [48]. Scholars have reported that the employee HR process is crucial in determining the effectiveness of HR practices to predict positive outcomes [60, 61]. Specifically, employees' perception and interpretation of implemented HR practices are more salient to positive employee attitudes, behaviour, and organisational outcomes than intended HR practices (e.g. content HR approach) [9]. This is because employees, as the final 'consumer' of practices, are responsible for translating HR strategy, policies, and practices into tangible outcomes.

As such, the first implication of this review for future HRM research in Africa is adopting process theories such as attribution theories to examine the employee's cognition of HR practices. Pursuing such research will contribute to the theory development of HRM in the African context as well as uncover the roles of employees' cognitive processes in the evaluation of Western-developed HRM in the African context. For example, scholars might gain particularistic cues (e.g. employees) needed for designing contextualised HRM policies and practices capable of yielding positive organisational outcomes in a disparate national context. To achieve this, I suggest integrating the three main attribution theories to capture broader cognitive complexities that influence employees' HR attribution process. Moreover, future longitudinal HRM research could investigate whether and how employee HR attributions may change over time in the African context. This may be due to a change in HR strategy and policies, government regulations, social exchange at work, line manager's leadership behaviour, etc. Conducting this research is likely to help gain a better understanding of the HR attribution process as an unbounded cognitive process based on the informational resources at the employee's disposal at a time [43].

Secondly, there is a lack of research on the role of line managers' leadership behaviour in the HR implementation process in the African context. As already stated, the concept of leadership in Africa is rooted in paternalism [57], a dynamic mix of benevolent and authoritarian leadership styles. Based on the ethnic, social, and religious diversity of Nigeria context, the line manager can display differentiated paternalistic leadership behaviour in the HR implementation process. As such, future research might benefit from this review by investigating the possibility of differentiated paternalism in the HRM process in the Nigerian context. One way to conduct this research is to examine the links between differentiated paternalistic leadership to employee perception of fairness in the HR implementation process. There is also an opportunity to examine whether differentiated paternalism accounted for differences in leader-member exchange within a team while accounting for the variances in ethnicity etc. Conducting this research is likely to contribute to leadership development programs with a focus on the enactment of HR practice at the operational level.

Third, there is a lack of research on employees' HR attribution across the private and public sector organisations. Public sector organisations possess certain defining features, such as standardised employment practices, collectivised labour unions, etc. that differentiate them from the private sector organisations - the latter is characterised by profit maximisation, selective HR practices, and private ownership. Based on Kelly's covariation model, future research might benefit from this review by investigating the type of information pattern (distinctiveness, consensus, and consistency) used by employees in making casual attribution about HR practices in both public and private sector organisations. Such the examination is likely to help detect the factors (e.g. organisational structure) that influences employee HR attribution in both organisational settings.
