Change management and performance of the kenyan churches – case of the anglican and african inland churches in kenya.

ABSTRACT

Change management play a vital role in improving performance of institutions. The church as one such institution charged with maintaining the moral standards of the society, may be becoming unpopular, especially among the youth who are the future generation to ensure its continuity. This was mainly because some churches might have not broken away from outdated thinking to embrace modernity and inevitable changes in this fast developing society. Dismal performance of the church in change management had not been adequately investigated and well understood hence hindering consistent improvement in performance of the church as an institution. To this end the general objective of this study was to examine change management as a performance improvement tool in churches guided by specific objectives: to determine the effect of organizational culture, to assess the impact of the change leadership strategy and to establish the how change communication strategy influence performance of the churches. The study adopted the most dominant Lewin Schein and Kotter’s theories/models that gave the guiding framework and covered the cross-section survey area of the Anglican Church of Kenya and African Inland Church, the study based at their respective Headquarters in Nairobi since the management of these churches was mainly organized and coordinated from the headquarters then the management decisions thereof disseminated to the branches countrywide. Questionnares were used to collect data and test-retest method to ensure reliability of the questionnares. The results were then be subjected to data coding, analyzed by use of descriptive statistics and regression analysis with the aid of SPSS and presented by use of frequencies, tables, percentages, means and standard deviations. Content analysis was used to analyze data that was qualitative in nature. This study illustrated like in the preliminary studies mentioned therein, that apart from for-profit organizations, non-profit organizations like the institutions of learning and churches use change management as a strategic management tool to enhance performance and good management. The findings of the study were that the institutional leadership, organizational culture and effective communication played very significant roles in enhancing the performance of the Anglican Church of Kenya and African Inland Church. The management of these churches needed to enhance the use of communication strategy and organizational culture as they had greater impact on performance of these institutions.