Competitive Strategies and Performance of Accredited Universities in Kenya

Abstract

Universities in Kenya, with the mandate of developing Kenya’s human resource, have received increasing attention due to rising concerns regarding their competitiveness for sustained performance. These concerns have been triggered by environmental shocks such as the recent covid-19 pandemic which caused disruptions in the global market, the Russia-Ukraine conflict that affected the country’s dollar liquidity and in turn causing runaway inflation, global oil price shocks, extreme weather conditions that caused drought in most of the arid and semi-arid areas, declines in real gross domestic product and severe hardship facing Kenya’s government’s capacity to fund university education. Against this backdrop, a conceptual model was developed whose main objective was to determine the effect of competitive strategies on performance of accredited universities in Kenya. The corresponding hypothesis stated that competitive strategies have no significant effect on the performance of accredited universities in Kenya. The implications of performance on competitive strategies were anchored on the Industrial Organization (IO) Economics theory as propounded by Mason (1939), advanced by Bain (1968) and adopted by Porter (1985). The theory was based on the structure-conduct-paradigm (SCP), which postulated that the structure of a market and/or industry impacted the “conduct” of businesses, which then impacted their performance. A descriptive cross-sectional survey design targeting a population of 53 accredited universities in Kenya was used. Primary data was collected using semi-structured questionnaires. The response rate from completed questionnaires was 66.6%. Data was analysed using multiple linear regression analysis. The findings from the analyzed data showed competitive strategies that had significant influence on performance of accredited universities in Kenya namely; market penetration, strategic alliances, focus strategy, differentiation and cost leadership, in that order. Future research could include other respondents such as staff and students to eliminate single source bias to enrich the study. Other methods such as longitudinal design could offer richer data and greatly support the research design and the outcomes. Key words: Competitive strategies, Competitive advantage and Performance of Accredited Universities in Kenya.