CAN COMPETITIVE STRATEGIES SHAPE PERFORMANCE OF PUBLIC ENTITY?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Firms operate within an environment that influences their operations either positivelyor negatively depending on the nature of their business. This study was guided by positivistphilosophy. The positivist school of thought is based on the assumption that only one reality exists,though it can only be known imperfectly due to human limitations and researchers can onlydiscover this reality within the realm of probability. The study adopted a descriptive cross-sectionalcensus survey on a population of 187 Kenyan State Corporations across the public sector. Thestudy used primary data collected by questionnaires administered to the Chief Executive Officers ofthe State Corporations. The study also used secondary data on performance collected from annualperformance contract reports for State Corporations for the five performance contracting cyclesbetween 2009 and 2014 from the Department of Performance Contracting in the Ministry ofPlanning and Devolution. The results indicated that competitive strategies had statisticallysignificant effects on the performance of Kenyan state corporations. At policy level, the Governmentwill benefit from the study by developing guidelines and policies to define the required competitivestrategies. Management will benefit from this study because they could use it to formulate internalorganizational processes that would guide the positioning of the organization. Performance wastested as a composite score as reported by the Performance Contracting Department. It would beinteresting if the individual competitive strategies dimensions were tested against the raw score ofeach of the six performance areas in the performance contracts.Since the context of the study wasKenyan State Corporations future research could be undertaken to replicate this to compareperformance of Kenyan State Corporations with that of public quoted companies at the SecuritiesExchange or other sectors of the economy to check whether the findings would be the same.Further, a similar study could be replicated but in a different context, such as a private companiesin Kenya using the same variables.