THE EFFECT OF ORGANIZATIONAL CULTURE ON STRATEGY IMPLEMENTATION: A STUDY OF THREE COMPANIES IN CONSTRUCTION SECTOR IN NAIROBI, KENYA

Abstract

For any organization today, a strategy provides, or should provide the overall plan against which management can excel in difficult times. Strategy is the most important planned decision whose influence on business operations of an enterprise is crucial. The construction industry is the engine of infrastructure development in the country. This industry has experienced substantial growth since independence. Despite such growth, major construction works in Kenya have been undertaken by foreign firms due to lack of adequate local capacity in the industry. To support the new collaborative culture a change in the culture of the construction industry is necessary. Not every contractor has generated the change towards this more collaborative culture yet. Although the relationship between organizational culture and strategy implementation implied, the exact impact of organizational culture on strategy implementation is unclear. The broad objective of this study is to establish the effects of organizational culture on competitive strategy implementation in construction sector: a case of Nairobi City County. Specific objectives were to determine the effects of clan culture on strategy implementation in the construction sector, to establish the effect hierarchy culture on strategy implementation in the construction sector, to establish the effect of market culture on strategy implementation in the construction sector and to establish the impact of adhocracy culture on strategy implementation in the construction sector. The exercise of data collection was administered by the researcher. Prior permission through a request letter was obtained before the data collection exercise and is expected to last for 20 minutes per respondent. The researcher made prior arrangement with the target respondents before travelling to the Company. Questionnaire completion process was in the presence of the researcher. This is so as to obtain reliable information and avoid misplacement of the questionnaires. The data was collected by use of various instruments. They were first edited to get the relevant data for the study. The edited data was coded for easy classification in order to facilitate tabulation. Quantitative data collected was analyzed by the use of descriptive statistics using SPSS package and presented through percentages, means, standard deviations and frequencies. The information was displayed by use of bar charts, graphs and pie charts and in prose-form. It was found that organization culture enhances social system stability, as well as guiding and shaping behaviour as shown by a mean of 4.56 and standard deviation of 0.08. The study concluded that top managers should demonstrate their willingness to give energy and loyalty to the implementation process which amount to being flexible thus creating an enabling environment of addressing customer’s problems so as to compete well with other players in the industry, in addition clan culture was found to be highly correlated with strategy implementation which therefore implies that clan culture in an organization is an important recipe in strategy implementation. In addition clan culture allows change and increases the effectiveness of strategy execution.