Perceived Effect of Organisational Change on Job Satisfaction Among Employees in County Government of Kwale, Kenya

Abstract

Organizational change is important to organizations because it is through change that organizations can grow and mature. However, organizational changes influence both job and organizational characteristics which in turn affects job satisfaction. Therefore, an understanding of the relationship between organizational change and job satisfaction is critical because these factors are key determinants of organizational performance. Most of the previous studies seem to have given little attention to the potential effects of perceptions, attitudes, or social influence on decisions and behaviors, which in turn leads to job satisfaction or dissatisfaction. Instead, previous researchers mostly concentrated on the social and economic aspects of change as opposed to the emotional and behavioral aspects. Therefore, the objective of this study was to explore the effect of employee perception of organizational change on job satisfaction at the County Government of Kwale. The study was informed by Fredrick Herzberg‟s Hygiene theory of motivation and John Kotter‟s eight-step organizational change model. The study adopted a cross-sectional descriptive survey research design targeting a population of 1928 employees of Kwale County Government who worked for the former local authority and national government. Data was collected using a questionnaire based on Kotter‟s 8 step change Model, from 307 out of 331 sampled employees representing a response rate of 92.7%. Data was then analyzed with the help of IBM SPSS statistics for windows, version 21, and presented in tables. The findings indicated negative perception among employees at Kwale County on communication of the change vision and creation of short-term wins and rewards. In addition, the employees‟ perceptions towards management support for devolution/change and its leadership, employees‟ empowerment to implement the change/devolution, and increased change momentum was indifferent. However, the employees showed positive perception on creating a sense of urgency, change vision/strategy development, and institutionalization of change. The findings also indicated that the participants were indifferent towards statements on general working conditions, remuneration, opportunity for career advancement, use of skills and abilities, and communication and decision making. On the other hand, participants were in agreement with the statements on relationship with supervisor, relationship with co-workers, job security, and workload and stress level. Finally, the results of correlation test indicated that all the organizational change factors had significant positive correlations with job satisfaction except communication and rewards. In addition, the results of multivariate regression indicated that almost 74.8% of the variance in job satisfaction was explained by the regression on organizational change factors. The study concluded that there was a positive relationship between organizational change and job satisfaction. In view of these findings, this study recommends that management implementing devolution at the counties must ensure that employees are adequately prepared for change, adequately represented on change management committees and understand the vision/strategy of change in order to enhance perception of transparency and improve level of their involvement and commitment. In addition, change management team need to enhance communication, implementation, maintain momentum of change, and institutionalization of change. The researcher also suggests similar studies to be replicated in other counties and more research to be done on the challenges which were

encountered when implementing the change programs especially in devolved Governments, as well assessments on employee job satisfaction after devolution