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The purpose of this paper is to examine managerial opinion regarding human resource management (HRM) practices in eastern Nigeria (western Africa).

This paper is informed by a survey administered to a small sample of Nigerian HR practitioners (n = 50 usable responses, 25 per cent response rate), replicating earlier work in different regions of the same country.

Nigerian HR practitioners appear open to people management practices under the HRM rubric. But rather than predicting convergence with western‐inspired approaches, evidence suggests that cultural and institutional influences on how normative HRM may be interpreted and acted on may result in a blend of transplanted and indigenous managerial behaviour.

Sensitivity to individuals’ socialization as well as economic, historical, political, and social contexts may enable multinational organizations to capitalize on the potential to transplant forms of HRM from parent country cultures to developing countries such as Nigeria, at least among managerial employees.

The paper augments and builds on limited empirically informed research to date on people management issues in African country contexts, helping to ground consideration of abstract debates in the literature around convergence and divergence in culturally and institutionally embedded managerial practice.