Influence of Human Resource Planning Practices on Lecturers’ Performance in Kenyan Public Universities

Abstract

Kenya Vision 2030 envisions provision of globally competitive quality education, training and research to citizens. Despite public universities’ contribution to this mandate, stakeholders such as World Bank, Commission for University Education, employers and scholars fault the quality and relevance of some academic programmes. The decline in quality is attributed to increased workload, reduced rigour in recruitment and promotion criteria, inability to attract and retain quality staff, and lecturers’ alleged incompetence. Previous studies relating human resource planning (HRP) practices to employee performance (EP) do not use descriptors of HRP like business plans, scenario planning, demand and supply forecasting, forecasting future requirements and action planning in entirety in addition to exhibiting mixed findings. This study intended to establish influence of HRP on lecturers’ performance in Kenyan public universities. It is anchored on Simon’s Decision Making Theory and supported by Barney’s Resource Based View; Adam Smith’s Human Capital Theory; and Herzberg’s Two-Factor Theory and implemented using descriptive cross-sectional survey research design. Target population comprised 1,653 lecturers in 14 chartered public universities established between 2009 and 2019. Multi-stage purposeful sampling technique was adopted to finally take a census of 158 academic heads of departments (lecturers) from 13 out of the 14 universities, having used 20 in piloting. Public universities account for 72% of the total university teaching staff hence the interest. Primary data were collected using semi-structured questionnaires while secondary data obtained from relevant secondary sources. Cronbach’s alpha coefficient was used to examine the internal consistency at 0.796 ( SD = 0.067). While content validity was ascertained by reviewing literature within the domain of study concepts and corroborated by a panel of experts, Pearson’s r was used to measure construct validity. Data were analyzed using Pearson’s r and regression analysis. The correlation between human resource planning (HRP) practice and lecturers’ performance was established to be positive and significant (r =.528, p =.000) HRP practice accounted for 38.0% (Adjusted R 2 =.380) of the variation in the lecturers’ performance in Kenyan public universities implying that it can predict their performance. The findings are useful to the management of public universities, HRM practitioners, researchers, organizational behaviourists and theorists. Keywords: Business plans, scenario planning, demand forecasting, supply forecasting, forecasting future requirements. DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/13-18-13 Publication date: September 30 th 2021