A survey of the extent of adoption of the strategic human resource management practices among the Non Governmental Organizations in Nairobi
Abstract
Ulrich and Lake (1990) stipulate that in today‟s highly competitive environment,
organization‟straditional sources of competive advantage, such as technology, patents
and economies of scale have been weakened by globalization and other environmental
changes. Hence it is argued that as an alternative, a skilled, motivated, and flexible
workforce can help develop an organization‟s sustainable core competency (Levine,
1995). NGOs are not in any way exempt from these global forces and they have to
respond accordingly for them to remain relevant.
The success of any organization to respond effectively to global challenges is dictated
by its ability to recruit and retain a talented workforce. Organizations that fail to
compete successfully in the global war for talent are likely to suffer dire consquences,
while those that excel will be well positioned to succeed.
For organizations to be able to adapt to their turbulent environment, they must
embrace strategic human resource management. This study investigates two issues
among the NGO sector organizations in Nairobi. One is to establish the extent of
adoption of adoption SHRM. Second is to establish whether the organizations are
changing from the traditional personnel management to the progressive SHRM which
views people as a very important asset unlike the earlier version of people
management which sees people as mere variable cost.A survey research is adopted by this study where heads of human resource
departments of the 111 NGOs which formed the sample for this study are targetted as
respondents.qustionnaires comprising both closed and open-ended questions were
administered through which both qualitative and quantitative data were obtained. Out
of the 111 respondents furnished with questionnaires, only 67 of them responded.
Several limitations were encountered such as expressed lack of interest in filling the
qestionnaires by the respondents.
The study used basic data analysis procedures such as frequency distribution, mean,
mode, median, minimum and maximum as measures of central tendencies and
dispersions. Multiple regression analysis was used to determine the significance of the
relationships between the dependent variables and the independent variables.
The findings of this study suggests that there are some SHRM best practices with very
low rate of adoption and those with high rate of adoption. The conclusions also
highlight those SHRM best practices with strong relevance to organizational
performance. Organizations have a long way to go in adopting SHRM and that there
is a lot of room for improvement for organizations to remain relevant vis-à-vis strong
competition in the NGO sector.
Publisher
University of Nairobi
Description
MBA Thesis