Influence of Strategic Leadership on Organizational Performance of County Government of Kitui, Kenya

The purpose of the study was to examine the influence of strategic leadership on the organizational performance of the County Government of Kitui, Kenya. A descriptive research design was used to determine the characteristics of the population under consideration. The respondents comprised 21 directors, 34 departmental managers, and 308 administrators. The study used a simple random method to sample the directors, departmental managers, and administrators. In the determination of the sample size, the study used Kothari's (2004) formula to select the 17 directors, 25 departmental managers, and 73 administrators. The study had questionnaires and interview guides to collect data from the participants. The directors were interviewed, whereas the departmental managers and administrators answered questionnaires. A pre-test study was undertaken in Machakos County Government. The study considered three types of validity, which were content, construct, and criterion. Cronbach's alpha was one of the methods of internal consistency that examined reliability. Notably, complete questionnaires were coded into SPSS version 26. Various descriptive statistics, like frequencies, percentages, means, and standard deviations, were derived. Inferential statistics such as Pearson correlation were analyzed to test the hypothesis, whereas the linear regression analysis including was provided. The regression coefficient for strategic leadership is 0.261. Further, the results indicate that all the variables had a significance value of less than 0.05 and a T-statistic of more than 2, meaning that strategic plan implementation variables were statistically significant. The study concluded that, the county leadership of Kitui had provided a suitable environment that supported learning and development among its staff. This was to improve their knowledge on the vision, mission, public policy, and get acquainted with various changing county operations. To improve the effectiveness of strategic leadership, the departmental directors should consider empowering communication policies that define horizontal and vertical communication structure.