| dc.description.abstract | Culture has been defined as the 'set of, often unconsciously held beliefs, ideas,
knowledge and values which shape the way things happen. Culture is shared hence a
group of people in a setting whether social or formal will collectively subscribe to
certain ideals.
Culture permeates most organisations including corporate compames and research
institutions. Over the last 15 years, there have been rapid changes in the environments
within which organisations operate. Such changes impact on the organisations internally,
which causes such organisations to respond. However there is always a gap between the
change in the environment, the strategic response and the internal capability of the
organisation to either take advantage of the opportunities presented by the environmental
change or minimise the negative impact brought about by such change.
Therefore culture is an important factor as far as strategic response for an organisation is
concerned. Together with structure and resources, culture is considered as one of the
three pillar of strategy implementation.
For strategy implementation to be successful therefore cultural considerations have to be
at the forefront to ensure that the right cultural environment that is conducive to strategy
implementation is present.
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In carrying out this study, a questionnaire was employed as the data collection
instrument and was administered on CGIAR centres in Ke~a and their Associates.
The initial sample was 101 respondents and 75 responded to the questionnaire, which
translates to a 74% response rate.
Four cultural traits namely involvement, consistency, adaptability and mission were
analysed with the aim of establishing whether the institutes' employees perceived the
traits to exist in the respective institutions. On average ICRAF's employees' perception
on the four variables exhibited a relatively high average score, followed by ICIPE and
then ILRI. This implies that ICRAF has more capacity to be flexible, open, and
responsiveness to the external environment than the other two institutions.
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The employees' perception on the degree of association between the mission or strategy
and adaptability, consistency and involvement was measured separately for each of the
institutions. The analysis demonstrated a significant degree of association between
mission and the other three variables.
Further, canonical correlation analyses were carried out to measure the employees'
perception on the degree of association between mission or strategy and adaptability,
consistency and involvement combined. This measure provided some way of assessing
whether the employees perceived some degree of alignment between mission and the
other cultural variables combined. The analysis revealed a significant alignment between
mission (strategy) and culture. However, the degree of association/alignment varied
between the three institutions. ICIPE and ICRAF demonstrate a relatively higher
alignment compared to ILRI. No institution demonstrated full alignment i.e. a score of 1.
Hence there is room for improvement at ICIPE and ICRAF but a lot more is required at
ILRI in order to obtain a fit between mission and the culture in the institute. | en |
