Influence Of Financial And Non-Financial Incentives On Employee’s Job Performance At Equity Bank Limited, Mount Kenya Region, Kenya

The success of an organization greatly relies on the performance of its employees. Finding the possible and effective ways to encourage people to exert extra effort beyond what is normally required among the employers and business researchers. It is believed that an employee’s behaviour is influenced by the different types of incentives. Therefore, for the purpose of rewarding as well as recognizing greater performance, incentives are key tools in regard to employee motivation. One of the ways of motivating employees is financial and non-financial incentives. The performance of an employee depends on the strength of incentive schemes used in an institution. In the rapid development of financial markets, commercial banks with Equity bank being one are facing intense competition and various challenges against the financial and non-financial incentives that already exist. The guidelines state that high standards need to be set by banks with appropriate incentives scheme framework.  Equity bank found itself at the receiving end when it began losing good employees to the competition.  The traditional financial and non-financial systems in place appeared to be inadequate to meet the employee’s needs. This study therefore intends to find out whether the incentives offered at Equity bank will increase employee job performance and assist the organization achieve its goals. The objectives of the study will be; to establish the influence of compensation on employee job performance, to determine the influence of incentives on employee job performance at Equity Bank, Mt. Kenya Region, to assess the influence of working conditions on employee job performance and lastly to determine the influence of recognition on employee job performance at Equity Bank, Mt. Kenya Region. The study was carried out at Equity bank Mt. Kenya Region. The study adopted the descriptive research design. The target population will comprise of 447 Equity bank employees in Mt. Kenya region. In this study the research will take on 30% of the employees which means, 134 employees were selected. The researcher relied on self-administered questionnaires. The researcher used Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 17.0. Descriptive statistics such as frequencies, percentages were used to summarize the data. Pearson’s correlation coefficient was used to establish the relationship between the independent and the dependent variable.  The findings revealed that that there was a significant and positive relationship between compensation and job performance. The findings showed that respondents were in agreement that favorable insurance medical cover, and bonus at the end of the year were not important in increasing employees’ job performance. The study recommended that the bank should put in place recognition incentives such as recommendation letters and employee of the month award so as to motivate the employees hence increase their performance. Taking the limitations and delimitations of the study, researcher suggested that since the study was carried out in one bank, a similar study could be carried out in another commercial bank to establish the factors that influence job performance in the banks. Since the study concentrated on only four variables namely compensation, incentives, working conditions and recognition, another study could be carried out on other variable to establish whether there are other variables that could influence employee’s job performance.