International Journal of Innovative Research and Development

Abstract

This paper analyzes the effect of Knowledge Conversion capability on Organizational Effectiveness in private Universities in Kenya from a SECI Model Perspective. The SECI Model describes the process of interaction between explicit and tacit knowledge. It is now accepted that we live in a knowledge economy and it has been predicted that those organizations that can convert information to organizational knowledge will be the most successful. It was of interest to understand how higher education institutions handle this crucial resource given that they are in knowledge business and thus subjected to market pressures like any other business organization.  Data was collected from the registrars/deputy registrars and academic staff using semi-structured face-to-face interviews which provided the data about how private universities perform these knowledge conversion activities. The study findings contribute to practice, theory and methodology. The findings indicated that knowledge conversion had an effect organizational effectiveness. The study examined private universities only. Future research should be conducted in other higher education institutions such as public universities, colleges and polytechnics. The study recommends that opinions of other stakeholders such as students, other members of staff, employers and communities be studied in future.

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Abstract

Strategy implementation presents the greatest challenge to organisations for various reasons one among them being insufficient alignment of staff incentives with the strategy to be implemented. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between strategic staff incentives and performance of insurance firms in Kenya specifically focusing on financial inclusion strategy. Drawing from the Herzberg’s two-factor theory, a cross-sectional survey of 48 permanent employees from 12 insurance firms was conducted using structured questionnaires in order to ascertain the relationship between strategic staff incentives comprising pay, oversight, meaningfulness of work, employee growth and job security are applied and how they relate to the level of performance as observed through the extent of financial inclusion indicators measured by access, usage, financial literacy and quality of service attained by these firms. The questionnaire items were anchored on a five-point Likert scale from 1=very dissatisfied to 5=very satisfied. It was found that the employees were dissatisfied with pay (M=2.53) and growth opportunities (M=2.56) and only moderately agreed that their jobs were meaningful (M=3.85) and secure (M=3.83); and that oversight (M=3.54) was also moderately satisfactory. It was further found that both oversight and job security were significantly related with financial inclusion indicators, namely financial literacy and quality of financial services (Oversight/Financial literacy: r = 0.398, p =0.04 <0.05; Job security/ Quality: r = 0.414, p=0.029 < 0.05). Oversight was also found to be significantly related with quality of service at p <0.1 (Oversight/quality: r = 0.32, p =0.09< 0.1). Based on these findings, it is recommended that management in insurance firms focus on providing effective oversight of staff because it had the most significant relationship with financial inclusion indicators. Similarly, job security should be ensured since it positively predicted quality of financial services provided by the insurance firms. Further, insurance companies should improve on their staff incentives since they were found to be largely unsatisfactory as reported by the survey respondents.

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