dc.description.abstract |
Performance of the National Police Service has been comparatively low in relation to
other public sectors despite their efforts to fulfill their mandate in the current dynamic
environment characterized by increased demand for service quality, globalization
phenomena, fluctuating environmental threats, employee diversity, competition,
preferences and technology. For instance, according to the 2017 East Africa Bribery
Index (EABI) report, the National Police service is still the most corrupt public sector,
with an 83.3% likelihood of corruption. In addition, the Independent Police Oversight
Authority reported in 2016 that 71% of Kenyans are dissatisfied with the way the
National Police Service provides its services. The inconsistent delivery of services has
been attributed to challenges like the appalling working conditions that police officers
are required to perform in, the lack of adequate housing facilities, work imbalances,
low pay, and insufficient career advancement programs, as shown by Ombudsman,
Human Rights Watch, and United Nations Development Program Reports. This served
as the foundation for the study that examined how the performance of Kenya's National
Police Service was perceived to be influenced by sustainable human resource
management capabilities. The specific objectives of the study were to establish the
perceived influence of career development, work-life balance and working environment
on performance of National Police Service in Kenya. The study was guided by
Resource based theory, Attribution theory and Contingency theory. A structured
questionnaire was used to collect data from a sample of 398 respondents who were
selected from a target population of 101,262 uniformed police officers by employing
stratified and simple random sampling. The study employed cross-sectional research
design. Descriptive and inferential statistics was used to facilitate analysis of
quantitative data with tools such as percentages, mean scores, frequency distribution,
and standard deviations, and factor analysis. The key findings along the study objective
reveal that police officers perceive sustainable HRM capabilities to have a positive
influence on the performance of the National Police Service. The Service's direction
and approach to achieving its objectives are clearly seen by the police officers as
sustainable HRM capabilities. Consistent with the attribution and resource-based
theory, organizational resources like career advancement, work-life balance, and
working conditions have been identified as crucial to improving performance. The
findings of the study are also consistent with other empirical studies that have identified
sustainable HRM capabilities as best practices that will result in superior organizational
performance. The study recommends the findings to be applied in the National Police
service during policy formulation and decision making. In addition, the study
recommends that alignment of perceived sustainable HRM capabilities to the
organizational strategy would improve performance of the National Police Service. A
critical discussion of this subject suggests a study on other public security institutions,
private security entities and comparative studies among East African countries like
Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda should be done to determine how sustainable HRM is
perceived to influence performance. Additionally, further research to establish whether
there is a link between gender complement and the success of implementing sustainable
human resource management capabilities may be interesting given that demographic
data revealed that there are more male than female police officers. |
en_US |