Teachers’ perceptions of the effects of principals’ managerial competencies on the adoption of strategic management in public secondary schools in Baringo County, Kenya

Abstract

Strategic management is a critical factor in strengthening organizational performance through effective decision making, systematic strategy formulation and implementation of strategic goals for the effective performance of an organization. Many successful organizations have consistently performed better than their competitors mainly because they have implemented strategic management. The Ministry of Education, Science and Technology (MOES&T) in the Republic of Kenya expects that all secondary schools put in place strategic management for performance improvement. At the time of this study only 10 out of 113 public secondary schools in Baringo County had adopted strategic management. The failure by 103 schools to adopt strategic management in the County implied that they would not benefit from the advantages associated with it and hence they would not achieve the performance standards set by MOES&T. The purpose of this study was to establish and clarify teachers’ perceptions of the effects of Principals’ managerial competencies on the adoption of strategic management in public secondary schools in Baringo County of Kenya. Cross-sectional survey design was used in the study. The target population for the study was constituted by all teachers of public secondary schools in Kenya while the accessible population was constituted by all the 985 teachers in the 113 public secondary schools in the County. Purposive sampling was applied in the selection of 26 schools and 340 teachers for this study. A questionnaire for teachers and an interview schedule to elicit information from Principals were used in the study. The two instruments were validated by ensuring that all items were related to strategic management. Prior to the data collection, the study instruments were piloted in six schools. The Likert-type questions were tested for internal item consistency by use Cronbach’s alpha, which yielded a coefficient of 0.9335; this was above the acceptable threshold of 0.70. The research hypotheses were tested by Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) at the 0.05 level of significance. The study found out that there was a significant difference in perceptions of the effect of Principals’ managerial competencies on the adoption of strategic management. The study concluded that the Principals’ managerial competencies had a significant effect on the adoption of strategic management in public secondary schools. The findings of this study are important for the Teachers Service Commission (TSC) and MOES&T in the deployment of Principals to secondary schools. The research findings are invaluable for teacher training in Universities so that their graduates fully integrate the strategic management approach for effective performance of secondary schools in Kenya.