Promotion and Employees’ Performance in the Nigerian Civil Service

Promotion makes every employee to look overvalued, exhibit happiness and greater commitments to the achievements of set organizational goals as it is oftentimes regarded as hard work “recognized and rewarded”.  Low employees’ performance recorded by many organizations today are largely attributed to employees’ emotional and psychological pains associated with non- recognition and reward for hard work popularly known as ‘non - promotion’. Thus, when an employee hard work, commitment and sacrifice is recognized and swiftly rewarded based on merit, it emotionally and psychologically propels such an employee to demonstrate ownership, commitment and improved performance to an augmented capacity in the organization. This scenario, will lead to job satisfaction, career fulfillment and achievement thereby enhancing accelerated progress in the organization. The paper employed the qualitative research method where materials from the literature were extensively utilized. The theoretical framework was the Expectancy theory by Victor H. Vroom. It was found that promotion was a privilege not a right in the Nigerian Civil Service. The paper concludes that non promotion could significantly lower employee morale, cause job satisfaction to remain low, and unattractive thereby affecting the overall productivity in the Nigerian Civil Service. The paper recommended that promotion as one of the effective motivational variables and an opportunity for growth, should expressly be considered a right for hard workers by the management and leadership of the Nigerian Civil Service.