Leadership Strategies Adopted by West Kenya Sugar Company Limited

Abstract

Previously, studies have been carried out about the sugar industry in Kenya and the competitive strategies adopted by these sugar mills to gain competitive edge. However, the research discovered that even though these studies cited various strategies, none was able to point out leadership approaches as a concern for the sugar crises in Kenya today. This study focused on the leadership strategies adopted by Kenyan sugar manufacturing companies to achieve their organizational goals. This study therefore sought to fill the existing research gap by carrying out a case study on the leadership strategies adopted by West Kenya Sugar Company limited as a force towards achieving the set organizational goals. The study targeted to interview ten leaders of West Kenya Sugar Company but two of the interviewees were unavailable due to busy schedules and therefore data was collected from the 8 respondents. The study proved that leadership is the kingpin of all operations in a firm and therefore all other strategy implementation depends heavily on the kind of leadership that is in place. Therefore, West Kenya Sugar Company and other sugar factories should invest heavily in leadership in order to make implementation of other strategies a force which will assist the country to fill the gap of sugar production which the study found out to be approximately 200,000 tons of sugar per annum. Effective and efficient leadership will improve the production rate from the current 57% to 76% which will translate to 1,000,000 tons of sugar produced per annum which is sufficient for both consumption and exportation. Key effective strategies were found by this study as task oriented behavioral leadership strategy and relation oriented behavioral leadership strategy. Though the study was limited to West Kenya Sugar Company and hence its findings cannot be used to generalize the practice in the entire sugar industry in Kenya.