Influence of organizational agility on operational performance of trademark East Africa

Abstract

In today‟s volatile market, market competition is causing both demand and supply to fluctuate more rapidly, widely, and frequently than they used to. Under this condition, firms ought to be agile and be able to sense and respond to market changes quickly and smoothly to maintain their operational performance. Organizational agility, which emphasizes rapid and innovative response to market change, thus is becoming a critical weapon to respond to market uncertainties and opportunities. Organizational agility dictates an organization„s capacity to adjust its internal processes in response to changes in the environment. Agile firms are resilient to shocks and upheavals, As such a firm remains an affected in terms of reliability, production cycle time and inventory turn. Therefore, all organization TMEA included requires acquiring agility to be able to respond to changes in business environment. This study seeks to investigate influence of organizational agility on operational performance in TMEA. This research problem was studied through the use of a descriptive research design. The target population for this study was the employees of Trademark East Africa. Also, transporters, clearing agents, recipients and government agencies were also are targeted. Stratified random sampling was used to select the study sample. Primary data was gathered through questionnaires and an interview guide. Both qualitative and quantitative methods were used for data analysis. The quantitative data in this research was analyzed by descriptive statistics using statistical package for social sciences (SPPS) version 20 while qualitative data was analyzed using content analysis. The study revealed that Information technologies provided superior information management capabilities, analytical decision support, and enhanced communication for achievement of enhanced operational performance, and that IT helps firms in sharing of knowledge and development of skills in addressing their operational problems, the practice of HRM needs to be integrated with the overall strategy to ensure effective use of people and provide better returns to the organizations in terms of ROI (Return on Investment), strategic alliance can provide a powerful competitive advantage in new markets, cost, speed, knowledge, and technology access. Therefore the study concludes that adoption of IT, human resources management practices and strategic alliances by TMEA all had appositive influence its operational performance. The study recommends that organisations need to adopt the use of ICT in their business operations, as ICT adoption was found to enhance organisational internal efficiency through reduction of operational cost and thus enhancing management, organisations need to have a strategic human resource plan in place, this will to help to highlight talent shortages, speeding up the process of identifying sources of new talent that could, upon hire, make significant business impact; organisations need to look forward in forming strategic alliances, formation of strategic alliance will helps to achieve organizational objectives better through collaboration and to gain access to intangible assets like brand name and expertise and that organization need also embrace change management strategies as this was found to be positively related with organisational competitiveness.