Moderating Influence of Organizational Culture on Relationship between Strategic Benchmarking Practices and Organizational Performance of the County Government of Kenya

Abstract

The commercial atmosphere in which firms are functioning in presently is extremely competitive, rapidly changing thus organizations have been forced to consider, and adopt or implement, a wide variety of innovative management programs and techniques. One of the modern approaches for determining appropriate measures is benchmarking. The unit of study was the County Government of Busia which is one of the 47 Counties in Kenya. The study was guided by Theory of Constraint and the Theory of Completion. The researcher used census survey research design. The study population targeted 10 heads of departments and 110 heads of sections from the County Government of Busia. Questionnaires were the main data collection instruments. Reliability of the questionnaire was evaluated using the Cronbach alpha test which gave an alpha average value of 0.7858. When organizational culture was introduced into the model, that is, on the relationship between strategic benchmarking practices and organizational performance, it reduced the influence of the strategic benchmarking practices on organizational performance in County Government of Busia. It was recommended that the management of the County Government of Busia should provide managerial support to its employees and capacity building their staff on the effects of strategic benchmarking practices and how these affect organizational performance. For the County Government to improve on their service delivery, they should apply internal benchmarking, functional benchmarking and competitive benchmarking to achieve service excellence.