Top Management Team Characteristics and Strategy Implementation in Nairobi County, Kenya

Abstract

Institutions usually have objectives that they strive to achieve in order to grow and also be sustainable. The achievement of these goals require proper strategies which is a process that includes planning, formulation and implementation. Successful strategy planning, formulation and implementation requires top management intervention since they are able to allocate and manage the institution’s resources. Strategy implementation is critical since without it, the whole process becomes ineffective. Top management and strategy implementation in public institutions is a challenge due to the nature of operational environment and since public service has to be provided to citizen, it is important to determine how top management affects strategy implementation in the public institutions. The lack of a similar study and a gap in knowledge on how top team characteristics affect strategy implementation led to the research objective which was to determine the effect of top management on strategy implementation in Nairobi County, Kenya. The characteristics that were used to operationalise top management team were tenure, professional diversity, size, age, and gender diversity. The study used these characteristics in top management teams to analyse how they affect strategy implementation in Nairobi County. With the research objective and TMT characteristics, the study conducted a case study focusing on Nairobi County so as to gain more insight to the study. With the case study, primary data was collected through semi-structured interview so as to have both uniform analysis and also to gather information not present in the questionnaire. Data was analysed using means, content analysis and Pearson’s correlation test so as to answer the research objective. The mean was calculated from the responses which were ordinal in nature so as to determine the extent to which the top management characteristics affect strategy implementation in Nairobi County. The study results indicated that TMT tenure had an effect on strategy implementation in Nairobi County to a great extent with a mean of 3.72. Profession diversity as a TMT characteristic was found to have an effect on strategy implementation to a very great extent with a mean of 4.08. The effect of TMT size was analysed and the study indicated that it also had an effect on strategy implementation to a great extent with a mean of 3.99. With regards to TMT age, the study results indicated that it had an impact on strategy implementation to a moderate extent with a mean of 2.79. Finally, the study indicated that gender diversity as a TMT characteristic had an effect on strategy implementation to a moderate extent with a mean of 2.19. Correlation tests indicated that TMT size and age were not significant factors with low negative correlation while tenure was significant but with low negative correlation. Other factors that were seen to have an effect on strategy implementation were politics and under-financing of the departments which has made the department not to be fully effective in implementing the strategies. The study recommended that policies should be provided to counties in regards to tenure, age, profession diversity, size, and gender diversity/ratio of the top management teams. Even though characteristic such as gender ratio has no huge effect on strategy implementation, it should be done so as to recognise all the gender and to move towards the one-third gender rule in the constitution.