Investigating the influence of human resource policies on employee performance in organizations; A case of Kenya Power & Lighting Company Nairobi.

Abstract

The impact of human resource management (HRM) policies and practices on firm performance is an important topic in the fields of human resource management, industrial relations, and personnel economics, industrial and organizational psychology (Boudreau, 1991, Jones & Wright, 1992; 3 Kleiner, 1990). This study investigated the effect of human resource policies on employee performance in organizations a case of Kenya Power & Lighting Company Limited. In the study, an attempt is made to determine the association between Training and employee performance, assess the influence of team work on employees’ performance, investigate the association between organization culture and employee performance and determine the effect of recruitment and employee performance in Kenya Power &Lighting Company, Nairobi. The study will be guided by three theories; Universalistic theory, Contingency theory and configurationally theory. Universalistic theory is also referred to as the best practice model, which is based on the assumption that there is a set of superior/best HRM practices, and that adopting them will inevitably lead to superior organizational performance (Luthans& Summer, 2005). The research design that will be used is a descriptive survey which will employ simple random Sampling and purposive sampling, to conduct a simple random sample; the researcher will first prepare an exhaustive list (sampling frame) of all members of the population of interest from each department where 30% of the total respondents from the 11 departments of Kenya Power & Lighting Company Nairobi will be elected making it 38, purposive sampling will be used to get 1 participant of the 11 departments making 11 supervisors. Data was collected by use of questionnaires and analyzed using Statistical Package for Social Scientists Version 20.0 (SPSS Ver 20.0). Descriptive statistics which includes frequencies and percentages were employed. Inferential statistics included use of chi- square and correlations to find out the relationship between HR policies and employee performance in Kenya Power and Lighting Company Nairobi. A significant relationship between organization culture and employee performance at .05 level of significance was found where organization culture affects employee performance in the company. There was a relationship between training of employees and employee performance where when training is done there is improvement in employee performance. Teamwork also was found to be significant to employee performance where working together as a team affects employee performance in an organization.