Strategic change management practices and the performance of constitutional commissions in Kenya.

Abstract

In the present day operating environment, change is an ever-present feature of organizational life, both at an operational and strategic level and this demands that the organization has to identify where it needs to be in the future and at the same time come up with a proper way of managing the changes required to getting there. The success of strategic change will depend not only on an organization‟s ability to implement new structures and processes, but also on the organization‟s ability to convey the new mission and priorities to its many stakeholders. The study was to establish the effect of strategic change management practices and performance of Constitutional Commissions in Kenya. The study adopted a cross sectional survey design where each of the 10 Constitutional Commissions formed the sample frame. A questionnaire was the main research instrument in which one questionnaire was administered to each of the constitutional Commissions. The findings of the study were that the constitutional commissions were undertaking strategic changes in order to align their strategies to the demands of the stakeholders and thereby matching the resources and activities of the organization to that environment. An integral part of an effective implementation of strategic change was found to be an effective internal communication that corresponds to each stage of the strategy, involvement of all important stakeholders, employee participation and a management team that will develop appropriate mechanism and harmonious working relationship with other employees during the change process. In effect, the findings support the position that effective strategic change has positive effect on the performance of constitutional commission. The challenges faced by the commissions in implementing the strategic change process include ineffective change management sponsorship from leaders, inadequate resources for training and incompatibility of the change management process with the organizational structure. The study recommends that the organizations leadership should not have a short term effect on the performance of the commissions from the change process but rather have a long term view in implementing the change. The study limitation was its limited scope and therefore the findings cannot be over generalized. As an area of future research, the study suggests that a mixed methods research that applies a longitudinal study to better capture the relationship.