Direct Effect of Talent Management Practices on Organizational Performance in the Public Sector: Empirical Evidence from Oromia Region, Ethiopia

This study examined the direct effect of five talent management practices (talent acquisition, training and development, performance management, reward and recognition, and retention) on organizational performance in the public sector of the Oromia region, Ethiopia, measured through the four Balanced Scorecard perspectives and framed by the Resource-Based View and the Ability–Motivation–Opportunity framework. An explanatory sequential mixed-methods design covered six regional executive bureaus and produced 350 usable civil service questionnaires (91.15% response rate) and 12 key informant interviews. Covariance-based structural equation modeling (CB-SEM) was run in IBM SPSS AMOS with 5000 bias-corrected bootstrap resamples. Model fit was excellent (χ2 = 14.730, df = 17, p = 0.615; CFI = 1.000; RMSEA = 0.000), and the model explained 56.1% of the variance in performance (R2 = 0.561). Training and development had the strongest direct effect (β = 0.288), followed by reward and recognition (β = 0.267), retention (β = 0.233) and performance management (β = 0.210), all at p<0.001. Talent acquisition had no detectable effect (β = 0.033, p = 0.409). Interviews showed that centralized civil service recruitment and generic written tests decouple hiring from the technical requirements of the bureaus, whereas internal human capital development drives administrative outcomes.