Relevance of Management Support and Consideration in Augmenting Organizational Resilience: Evidence from Telecommunication Companies in Kenya

Abstract

The emergence of crises and shocks in the last few decades has left devastating disruptions in businesses across the world. Such disruptions often lead to unexpected disorientation, low profitability and losses, stagnation, and in some cases liquidation of businesses. As a result, there have been continuous calls for developing systems within the business that would enable businesses to be resilient and absorb such shocks. Existing literature on organizational resilience has focused on the relationship between resilience and other constructs such as performance, efficiency, competitiveness, and productivity: Giving little or no attention to the role that management support consideration in attaining organizational resilience. The objective of the study was therefore to examine how management support and consideration affect organizational resilience in telecommunication companies in Kenya. The study was anchored on the Managerial Grid of Leadership Theory. A positivist research philosophy was adopted. The preferred research design was a quantitative descriptive approach and cross-sectional descriptive survey. The study population comprised 9,847 participants drawn from all 19 registered telecommunication companies in Kenya. From this population, a sample size of 384 respondents was selected using a stratified sampling technique. Primary data was used which was collected via structured questionnaires. Corrected data were analyzed using descriptive statistics and inferential analysis via correlation analysis and regression analysis. Hypothesis testing was based on regression results analysis. The predictive power of the model was tested using the coefficient of determination (R2), the fitness of the model was tested using Analysis of Variance (ANOVA) while the significance of management support and consideration in predicting organizational resilience was based on P-value in Student t-test at 0.05 significance level. Results showed that management support and consideration existed among telecommunication companies in Kenya. There was an agreement among the respondents that telecommunication companies in Kenya were resilient in the last five years. Correlational results revealed that management support and consideration had a positive correlation with organizational resilience. Hypothesis testing results established that there is a significant relationship between management support and consideration of organizational resilience in telecommunication companies in Kenya. Therefore, it was concluded that management support and consideration have a significant effect on organizational resilience in telecommunication companies in Kenya. The study thus recommends that organizational leaders should develop capacity-building programs, spur creativity, innovation, and organizational efficacy to accomplish the set corporate goals and gain resilience through robust business continuity plans among other relevant initiatives.