Organizational culture on the relationship between strategy and performance of the top ten insurance companies in Kenya

Abstract

Every organization understands that a clear and directed strategy is needed to achieve business success, but the role of culture in regard to strategy and performance is often not recognized. Theoretically, it has been argued that culture of a n organization affects those who make the strategy for the organization and the strategy which is made affects the resultant performance of the organization. The purpose of the study was to establish the influence of culture on the relationship between strategy and performance of the top ten insurance companies in Kenya. The study adopted a descriptive research design on a target population of top ten insurance companies registered in Kenya. The study used self-administered semi-structured questionnaires as the main instrument for data collection. Using Statistical Package for Social Sciences, descriptive analysis was done on the data collected. This involved: frequencies, percentages, mean and standard deviation. Regression analysis was used to establish the relationship between culture and performance and between strategy and performance. The study findings show that organization corporate-culture has had an impact on employee performance. Culture was rated highly by 88% of the respondents as affecting the global sourcing of efficiency. The implication is that the insurance sector in Kenya is not effectively implementing its strategies because employees have a culture that they do not want strategy to change. Besides, workplace behaviors affected employee productivity in insurance sector. The study concluded that insurance companies have tried harness and align their organizational culture to their strategies in order to improve their performance. The study recommends mitigating risks involved in integrating organizational culture with performance, and creating an effective and efficient environment, insurance companies need to ensure that employee-steer business and maintain strong corporate- strategy relationships at all times. The study also found that organizational structure influences employee performance at the insurance sector in Ken ya. The implication from this is that if strategy formulators formulate vague strategies, they will not have ab effect in improving employee performance at the insurance sector.