Competitive strategies adopted by Nairobi aviation college, Kenya
Abstract
Today’s business environment coupled with unrelenting competition and increased
uncertainty has made it complex for many organizations to operate. There have been an
emergence of better informed and more discriminating customers who have pushed this
organizations to compete at the highest level with the primary focus of increasing their
market share and safeguard against the unknown. Competition has been as a result of
scarcity of resources, rareness of opportunities and yet the ease of entry in the market by
rival organizations persists. In response, managers have opted to formulation and
adoption of competitive strategies as they deploy organizational resources to meet the set
objectives and create a sustainable competitive advantage over their rivals. The
commonly used competitive strategies are Porter’s generic strategies such as Cost
Leadership and Differentiation. This research is based on a case study of Nairobi
Aviation College which has been in operation for sixteen years and has experienced
extensive growth over time. The study had two objectives, the first objective of the study
was to establish the competitive strategies adopted by Nairobi Aviation College and the
second objective was to determine the challenges faced by Nairobi Aviation College in
adopting competitive strategies. The study established that Nairobi Aviation College
adopted several competitive strategies such as cost leadership, differentiation, expansion,
resource regeneration and improvement. The strategies were very effective leading to the
phenomenal growth of the institution. It was also established that the college faces many
challenges in adopting competitive strategies such as high staff turnover, inadequate
financial resources and employee resistance to new ways of doing things. The study
recommends that companies should adopt competitive strategy that matches with their
internal resource capabilities and synchronize them to the external environments instead
of copying other companies’ strategies. The study also recommends that a survey be done
on middle level colleges to enable generalization of findings.
Publisher
University of Nairobi