Abstract:
Strategy implementation drivers play a crucial role in shaping organizational strategies with varying degree of influence on their performance. It defines the organizational performance but its achievement remains a significant challenge in government departments as well as non-state actors. Fundamentally, inappropriate or failure in strategy implementation leads into disparities in service delivery. This study assessed the effect of strategy implementation drivers on the performance of National Government departments in Kenya, with stakeholder involvement as a moderating variable. The specific objectives were to assess the effect of managerial roles, strategic communication, organizational resources, leadership practices and stakeholder involvement on the performance of National Government departments in Kenya as well as assessing the moderating effect of stakeholder involvement on the relationship between strategy implementation drivers and the performance of the departments. It was grounded on resource-based view theory, communication theory, administrative management theory, contingency theory of leadership and stakeholder theory. The study was restricted to the counties in Kenya, adopting positivism research philosophy which led to choosing of cross – sectional research design. It focused on 535 National Government departmental heads across selected counties in Kenya as the target population. Multistage sampling was used in selecting the study location as well as the target population and the sample. While proportionate sampling was used in forming a sample size of 214 heads of departmental heads and simple random sampling was utilized in picking the specific counties and the respondents. The study data collection instrument was a semi – structured questionnaire which covered all the research objectives. The tool was administered to the respondents through drop and pick method. The reliability and validity of the tool was tested using data obtained through a pilot study conducted before rolling out the main study data collection. Content analysis and the Statistical Package for Social Sciences were employed to analyse the qualitative and quantitative data collected, respectively. The findings revealed that managerial roles, strategic communication, leadership practices, organizational resources as well as stakeholder involvement had a statistically significant effect on departmental performance. However, the study also established that stakeholder involvement does not a significantly moderate the relationship between these drivers and departmental performance. Further, the findings revealed the identified strategy implementation drivers collectively accounted for only 27.1% of the variation in departmental performance. Based on these findings, the study recommends that National Government departments to embrace the identified drivers, investigate for other potential performance drivers and re – engineer their strategy implementation process while similar research could be conducted within County Governments in Kenya.
