Influence of organizational culture on strategic change management in Makueni county government, Kenya

Abstract

Strategic change management as a set of flexible actions and choices that give rise to design and execution of plans that achieves overall organizational objectives is absolutely necessary in the wake of fluidly global political, economic and technological environment. It is the fulcrum that enables organizations to respond with agility, adaptability and to align to the events acting with and surrounding modern business and political entities. A lot of studies have been undertaken in the area of change management in a bid to elucidate on the practice of strategic change management commercial business set ups. However, there is dearth of literature that underpins the influence of organizational culture on implementation of strategic change management in the recent county governance system in Kenya, more specifically in the Makueni county government. This study therefore embarked on studying the aforementioned factor using the theoretical foundation of Kotter’s change management model. A theoretical model was developed and tested based on the hypothesized relationship between organizational culture and strategic change management. Using descriptive survey design and target population of 4100 employees of the county government of Makueni as the county human resource database, 2018, the study obtained data from a sample of 351 employees using simple random sampling methods. The study used questionnaires to collect primary data. Pilot test was done using 10% of the questionnaires before corrections were appropriately done and the questionnaires administered to the respondents using drop and pick method. The study data was analyzed using both descriptive and inferential statistics and with the help of SPSS version 20. The study found that organizational culture determined strategic change management implementation at the county government of Makueni with organizational leadership and organizational culture having greater influence at R2 being 0.850 and 0.862 respectively. The study concluded that implementation of strategic change management was explained by organizational culture. The study model was significant with all p values being less than 0.05. The study therefore recommended that county governance systems must consider re-designing, configuring and orienting their key physical resources and human resources practices and activities as a way of adding strategic change management into their corporate strategy and operations.