Strategic Change Management and Employee Performance in Public Universities in Upper Eastern Region, Kenya

Change management is effective management of a business modification that organizational leaders, administrators and employees thrive in to successfully realize the needed technology or organizational changes. Recognizing the essential for change and foreseeing organizations through change is the most challenging role for any leadership. Strategic management determines the vectors of the future development of the company with clear goal for activities. Some changes can be alterable while others are not hence the risk involved in managing change.  The general objective of this study was to determine the role of strategic change management on employee performance in public universities Upper Eastern Region, Kenya. It was guided by the following specific objectives; to establish the influence of strategic cultural, strategic leadership and strategic communication on employee performance in public universities Upper Eastern Region, Kenya. The study was anchored on Kurt Lewis change management theory and supported by two other theories, Resource Based View theory and Leadership theory. Descriptive survey design was adopted using quantitative methods. Employees of these three universities were the study population, with a target population of 1296 employees. Data was obtained using structured questionnaires, a sample size of 324 respondents and a response late of 246 indicating a response rate of 75.95%. Stratified sampling technique was used in selecting Academic Staff and Support Staff while purposive sampling technique was used to select the university Management Staff, lastly stratified sampling was used to select the Administrative Staff. Cronbach alpha coefficient was used to assess the questionnaire’s reliability, and a score of at least 0.7 indicated the dependability of the data. Quantitative data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistics. The findings indicated that there was a significant positive relationship between strategic change management and employee performance in public universities in Upper Eastern, Kenya, where strategic culture was able to explain (β=0.495; p=0) strategic leadership explained (β=0.597; p=0) while strategic communication explained (β=0.557; p=0) of the variances in the employee performance. The overall variance of strategic change management on employee performance was 42.1%. Conclusion of the study was that implementation of strategic culture, offers fresh perspectives by defining the organization’s culture and educating staff members about the significance of embracing the company’s ethics and values. It further concludes that strategic leadership positively and significantly impacts employee performance and that a smooth way of passing information in an organization makes employees feel part of it and improves ways of solving conflicts thus enhanced performance. The study recommends further exploration into how these factors could be enhanced through targeted interventions and their effect on both academic and administrative staff. Future studies could also examine the generalizability of these findings to other regions or educational settings.