A survey of employee perception of culture and strategy alignment at the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) centres in Kenya and their Associates

Abstract

Culture has been defined as the 'set of, often unconsciously held beliefs, ideas, knowledge and values which shape the way things happen. Culture is shared hence a group of people in a setting whether social or formal will collectively subscribe to certain ideals. Culture permeates most organisations including corporate compames and research institutions. Over the last 15 years, there have been rapid changes in the environments within which organisations operate. Such changes impact on the organisations internally, which causes such organisations to respond. However there is always a gap between the change in the environment, the strategic response and the internal capability of the organisation to either take advantage of the opportunities presented by the environmental change or minimise the negative impact brought about by such change. Therefore culture is an important factor as far as strategic response for an organisation is concerned. Together with structure and resources, culture is considered as one of the three pillar of strategy implementation. For strategy implementation to be successful therefore cultural considerations have to be at the forefront to ensure that the right cultural environment that is conducive to strategy implementation is present. 4< In carrying out this study, a questionnaire was employed as the data collection instrument and was administered on CGIAR centres in Ke~a and their Associates. The initial sample was 101 respondents and 75 responded to the questionnaire, which translates to a 74% response rate. Four cultural traits namely involvement, consistency, adaptability and mission were analysed with the aim of establishing whether the institutes' employees perceived the traits to exist in the respective institutions. On average ICRAF's employees' perception on the four variables exhibited a relatively high average score, followed by ICIPE and then ILRI. This implies that ICRAF has more capacity to be flexible, open, and responsiveness to the external environment than the other two institutions. vii : The employees' perception on the degree of association between the mission or strategy and adaptability, consistency and involvement was measured separately for each of the institutions. The analysis demonstrated a significant degree of association between mission and the other three variables. Further, canonical correlation analyses were carried out to measure the employees' perception on the degree of association between mission or strategy and adaptability, consistency and involvement combined. This measure provided some way of assessing whether the employees perceived some degree of alignment between mission and the other cultural variables combined. The analysis revealed a significant alignment between mission (strategy) and culture. However, the degree of association/alignment varied between the three institutions. ICIPE and ICRAF demonstrate a relatively higher alignment compared to ILRI. No institution demonstrated full alignment i.e. a score of 1. Hence there is room for improvement at ICIPE and ICRAF but a lot more is required at ILRI in order to obtain a fit between mission and the culture in the institute.