Abstract:
Employee retention and talent management issues are becoming the most critical workforce management challenges of the immediate future. State corporations are organizations formed and owned by the government to provide services to citizens. State corporations in Kenya are operating in highly competitive environment owing to today’s rapidly moving dynamic, uncertain and highly competitive global markets. The objective of this study was to establish the effect of talent management on employees’ retention in Kenya’s state corporations. Specifically, the objectives were to establish whether competency mapping, employee engagement, career development and performance management influenced employee retention and the moderating effect of age on employees’ retention in state corporations in Kenya. The study adopted a cross sectional design as it took a representative sample of its target group based on overall findings of the views of those targeted. The target population comprised of all the employees in the 162 state corporations in Kenya as in December 2011. The respondents were the heads of departments and HR managers in the state corporations. Stratified sampling was used to select the respondents from different categorization of state corporations. A self-administered questionnaire was used as the main tool for data collection and was administered to a total of 385 respondents. Reliability of the survey questionnaire was calculated according to Cronbach’s alpha coefficient and in order to measure the validity of research, content validity was used. To analyze the collected data, descriptive and inferential statistics were used. Statistical software used was SPSS version 20. The study findings indicated that talent management had a positive and significant effect on employee retention. Obtained results showed that there was a significant positive relationship between competencies mapping, employees’ engagement, performance management, and career development and employee retention in Kenya state corporations. Moreover, the findings revealed that there is a significant positive moderating effect between age and employee retention. The moderating effect of age strengthened the positive relationship between: career mapping, employee engagement, and career development and employee retention. The study recommended that state corporations in Kenya should devise measures of retaining employees through career mapping, employee engagement in decision making, performance management and career development. It further recommended that talent management strategy must be engraved in the business strategy characterized by state corporations’ regulary analyzing talent and communicating the same talent strategy to employees.The study suggests future studies should look at the different levels of state corporations for a comparative study with other sectors such as County and Central government.
