Effect of Transformational Stewardship on Service Delivery by County Governments in Kenya

Abstract

Globally, public sector leaders face a common set of challenges of delivering services that meet their customer expectations.Kenya has undergone significant changes over the years in a bid to improve its public service delivery with the latest being devolved governments that envisage bringing services closer to the people. Transformational stewardship is a concept that envisions a public leader equipped with certain traits that enable him/her to be a custodian of public resources. The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of Transformational Stewardship in enhancing Service Delivery by devolved governments in Kenya.The specific objectives of the study were; to examine the effect of intrapersonal traits, operational mindset, interpersonal traits and change consciousness on service delivery by devolved government units in Kenya. Four research hypotheses were obtained in line with the objectives. The study adopted descriptive and correlational research design and the primary data collected through a structured questionnaire administered to the respondents. The study targeted 363 County officers drawn from various management cadres (Chief officers, Directors, Deputy directors and County assembly heads) focusing on Central Kenya Counties, specifically Kiambu, Kirinyaga, Murang’a, Nyandarua and Nyeri. Stratified random sampling technique was used to select the respondents, with simple random sampling within each stratum, and the sample size was 90 respondents. Descriptive statistics such as mean, standard deviation and frequency distribution was used to analyze the data. Regression analysis was also carried out and findings used to display the strength of the relationship between the independent variable, Service Delivery, against all the four independent variables. F-tests were used to test the hypothesis of the study. The findings of this study indicated that there was a strong positive linear relationship between the independent variables; intra personal traits, operational mindset, interpersonal traits and change consciousness and were found to significantly affect service delivery. Change consciousness had the most robust effect while interpersonal skills had low effect. It is recommended that counties should identify transformational traits during recruitment and to nurture them to managerial positions. Change consciousness plays a significant role in the running of counties thus efficient communication systems must be put in place to keep up with the dynamism that devolution presents. In addition personal staff competences should be enhanced through training. Staffing levels should be increased especially in county health facilities for better service delivery. Political interference should be mitigated and policies put in place to determine the kind of professionals needed to work in leadership positions in the county level. Further, it was recommended that complaint management systems should be improved to ensure equitability and sufficient public awareness conducted to sensitise the public on avenues of complaint management. Further research can be done to establish why new technologies (IFMIS and e-procurement) haven’t improved service delivery in addition to other factors not considered in the study e.g work environment, employee competency and existing service delivery policies and their effect on service delivery.