Human Resource Practices and Service Delivery in Kakamega County, Kenya

Abstract

Organisations, both public and private, are experiencing unprecedented paces of change, calling for a continuous re-evaluation of their operating models and other strategies to withstand those changes and benefit from them for sustained performance. New approaches that bring on board the modern strategic management techniques are necessary for the government to attain improved performance and the overall service quality. Effective human resource practices have been touted to be an effective management tool in changing a bureaucratic public sector to a more responsive as well as an innovative administration. This paper assessed the effect of human resource practices on service delivery in Kakamega County, Kenya. The accessible population comprised 381 respondents drawn from all the county ministries. A correlation survey research design and stratified random sampling technique was used to establish the units of study. Questionnaires were used to obtain information from the respondents, after which it was analysed through descriptive and inferential statistics with the help of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 21 and data presented in the form of percentages, frequencies and tables. The study established that there is a positive and significant relation between human resource management practices and the service delivery in Kakamega County at 1% significance level (r=0.806, p=0.000)). Following the hypothesis testing using regression analysis, the study rejected the null hypothesis and concluded that human resource practices greatly affected the service delivery in Kakamega County. The study recommended that more resources be invested in improving its human capital since the study found out that human resource management techniques are crucial in the service delivery processes.