Determinants of Strategic Change Management Practices Among County Governments in Kenya

Abstract

The process of change management is extremely important since it is a structured process designed to facilitate the transitioning of people, groups as well as an organization‟s present circumstance to a better and improved state. This mechanism involves the organization defining new values and behaviours, roles and positions among its workers so as to prepare them for the new changes and to cement goal congruence and a common vision between an organization and its customers. The organizational setting in which organizations operate are extremely dynamic thus necessitating continuous investigation into how can strategic change can be executed within an organization so as to survive against this forces. For successful execution of this change, it is important to undertake an analysis in order to understand how different factors contribute to strategic change and thus this study's main objective was to examine the determinants of strategic change management practices among county governments in Kenya. This study was anchored on two theories namely Kurt Lewin‟s Three Step Planned Change Model and the Kanter‟s Theory of Change Management. This study utilized a research design that is descriptive. The target respondents were the forty seven County governments in Kenya. Primary data was collected from the County executive using mail questionnaires. The mail questionnaires were five Likert type. The primary data collected mainly looked into different determinants of strategic change. The study also utilized secondary data in order to gather demographic information of counties such as population density, number of households, area in square KM2 and gender. The data collected was analyzed employing both descriptive and inferential statistics. The inferential statistics was undertaken by performing a regression analysis on the dependent variable (Strategic change management)) and the independent variables (organisational leadership, strategy implementation, resource allocation and organizational culture). The study found that the determinants have a significant effect on the strategic change management at Kenyan County governments. This was evidenced by a p value of 0.001 at 95% level of confidence. This shows that the model adopted for this study was significant and that the selected were significant in predicting the strategic change management at the Kenyan County governments. It was concluded from the study that the attainment of strategic change is not a solely independent process but entails the coordination of different factors such as human resource, organizational culture, leadership and strategy implementation. The study therefore recommends that County governments and other organisations must ensure that adequate resources for the process of change in availed, organisational culture is favourable, leadership is the organisation is effective and that good strategic implementation approaches are adopted so as to enhance strategic change management.