Strategic Change at Nairobi Women’s Hospital, Nairobi, Kenya

Abstract

The present business environment has been characterized by rapid technological and operational change attributed to change in service operation delivery means and sophisticated customer demands. As a result, contemporary businesses are progressively adopting the implementation of change management as a strategic approach, with the expectation that it would lead to enhancements in their objectives. The primary aim of this study was to investigate the many elements that influence strategic transformation within the context of Nairobi Women's Hospital. Specifically, the role of organizational structure, leadership, culture, and Human Resources and technological changes was assessed. The findings reveal that that the centralised structure affected agility, communication and the speed of decision making and to counter the same, the organization had decentralized its services and thus empowering staff to make faster decision making and thus customer satisfaction. Organizational culture impacted on the change process because it did not encourage diversity of workforce and decentralization of decision making. Organizational leadership was found to also affect the strategic change process in the hospital for not allocating adequate resources to the change process, not effectively aligning the change process to the organization vision and mission, not handling the resistance to the changes, and failing to make certain critical decisions. The study findings also suggest that technological changes have brought about organizations market disruption and thus the organization has had to carry out the technological change to remain relevant. Strategic changes in this area were found to also benefit from data-driven decision-making processes to gain insights, identify trends, and make informed choices. Effective communication, development of a change program, leadership development and succession planning policies aimed at identifying and grooming leaders who can effectively lead and support the organizational change was recommended. The study was limited on the context, research methodology that was a case study and limited number of interviewees thus limited the generalizability of the findings.