Top Management Diversity and Performance of Levels Four and Five Hospitals in Nairobi City County, Kenya

Abstract

Top management diversity has been frequently depicted as a positive power in an organization that is expected to affect the efficient functioning of the firm since diversity is claimed to result in a wide variety of ideas, innovation and creativity which therefore enhancing decision making processes that leads to greater performance of a team. The aim of the study was to establish the effect of senior management diversity on the performance of lvels four and five hospitals in Nairobi City County, Kenya. Towards the realization of the research objective, the research adopted a cross-sectional survey design of all the levels four and five hospitals in Nairobi City County. The unit of analysis were the 22 hospitals while the target respondents were human resource and finance managers of the hospitals. Data was analyzed using descriptive measures of mean and standard deviation while the presentation was made using tables, pie charts and figures. The independent variables whose influence was investigated were the top management educational background diversity, functional diversity, social diversity and tenure diversity. The results in the variable results of the predictors have been that the educational diversity of the hospital's top management shows that the different teams are better equipped to handle complex decision situations for their departments due to their ability to derive implications for several strategies. The discovery of functional diversity has manifested itself in the skills of senior management, which helps companies to develop their strategic positioning and top management of the organization, facilitating strategic organizational changes that improve the performance of the company. The tenure of senior management revealed that people from different cultures in a group generate ideas of high quality, more effective and feasible than having people of the same culture in a group. The social diversity also revealed that top management comes from diverse gender and different ethical background. The combined effects of the independent variables show that all the variables had positive effect on firm performance except tenure diversity that gave a negative coefficient (-0.421). Tenure diversity and functional diversity were found to be significant since their p-value were less than 0.005 while social diversity and education diversity variables were insignificant. Similarly the ANOVA results show that four predictor variables can significantly predict the performance of the hospitals since the F-Value = 14.771 was lower than the critical values. The study concludes that indeed top management diversity enhances the performance of the hospitals and as a result, the research recommends that both the educational and social diversity of the hospitals should be enhanced through continuous trainings as well as encouraging the staff to join increased social groupings such as private members clubs.