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Access to clean and safe water remains a critical development priority under Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 6. However, water service providers in Sub-Saharan Africa, including Kenya, continue to experience performance challenges associated with governance, infrastructure limitations, and leadership effectiveness. This study examined the moderating effect of employee engagement on the relationship between exemplary transformational leadership and the performance of selected water and sewerage companies in Kenya. Grounded in transformational leadership theory, the three-component theory of work engagement, and the balanced scorecard framework, the study adopted a positivist philosophy and a quantitative cross-sectional survey design. Data were collected from 328 employees drawn from 13 public water companies operating under the Athi Water Works Development Agency using structured questionnaires. Exemplary transformational leadership was measured through three practices—modeling the way, challenging the process, and empowering followers—while employee engagement was assessed through vigor, dedication, and absorption. Organizational performance was evaluated using indicators of service quality, economic efficiency, and operational sustainability. Descriptive statistics, Pearson correlation, and moderated multiple regression analysis were conducted using SPSS version 27. The findings revealed that exemplary transformational leadership and employee engagement significantly and positively influenced water company performance. Importantly, employee engagement significantly moderated the relationship between exemplary transformational leadership and performance (β = −0.689, p < .05), indicating a buffering effect in which leadership had a stronger impact under conditions of low engagement. The study contributes to leadership and public sector management literature by empirically validating the moderating role of employee engagement within Kenya’s water sector. It recommends integrating employee engagement strategies with leadership development initiatives to enhance service delivery, operational efficiency, and long-term sustainability in water utilities.

This study reports empirical findings of a survey conducted among pharmaceutical distributors serving informal settlement areas in Nairobi city county. The pharmaceutical distributors face several challenges when serving these areas calling the management of the distributors to resort to social innovation as a viable strategy for business survival. The concern however is how sustainable such a strategy is to the survival of the business undertaken by the pharmaceutical distributors. The study was guided by the postulates of the Three Cycle and Tripple Bottom Line models to answer three objectives that sought to address how social innovation has been adopted, the level of sustainability attained as well as the effect of the level of social innovation on the level of sustainability attained. The study drew its population from 30 pharmaceutical distributors targeting informal settlement areas in Nairobi and obtained primary data from managers heading 7 key departments in each distributor. The study was responded to by 168 managers from 30 pharmaceuticals representing 80.4% response rate. Two components of social innovation, namely promoting social values and community empowerment were extracted through Exploratory Factor Analysis and were found to be practiced to a moderate extent (M=3.6; SD=1.36) and contributed to high level of sustainability (M=3.808; SD=1.025). A path analysis constructed using structural equation modelling indicated that the two components of social innovation have varying degrees of contribution to the three pillars of sustainability (planet, people & profit) with the highest being that on people (R2=4.03) and the least on profit(R2=3.46). Overall social innovation has a negative effect on sustainability (?=-0.13; p<0.05). The findings provide useful insights on the role of social innovation as a viable strategy for the sustainability of the pharmaceutical industry and makes suggestions on how it can be deployed to enhance sustainability in the pharmaceutical industry. The findings raise important implications on the relevance of the Three Cycle and Triple Bottom Line Models in explaining the role of social innovation in attaining the goal of sustainability in organizations.

This study aimed to test the effect of leadership strategy on the organisational resilience of banks listed on the Nairobi Stock Exchange. The study was anchored on Full-Range Leadership Theory (FRLT) complementarily with meta-leadership as relevant theoretical lenses. The study sampled 277 respondents holding senior managerial positions such as Chief Risk Officers, Managing Directors, Directors of Strategy, Internal Auditors, Heads of Marketing, Heads of Operations and Branch Managers. Data was collected using a self-administered Likert-type online questionnaire. Structural equations modelling was employed for statistical analysis. Partial Least Squares was performed with SmartPLS 3. Results showed that the relationship between leadership strategy and organisational resilience was statistically significant at t-value of 31.665 (p<0.05), with leadership strategy explaining 68.5% of the variance in the organisational resilience of listed banks in Kenya (R2=0.685). The study concluded that leadership strategy significantly predicted bank resilience. The study has affirmed leadership strategy as a novel theoretical concept for explaining organisational resilience to systemic disruptive shocks. Multiple future research directions are proposed. This study advanced leadership strategy as a distinct paradigm in leadership thinking by examining its predictive power on organisational resilience by using systemic disruptive shocks as testing grounds within the context of Kenya’s banking sector.

The primary intent of this study is to establish the role of transformational governance on millennials’ dedication to level - 5 private hospitals in Kenya. A mixed methods study was applied using a cross-sectional exploratory survey design with quantitative and qualitative approaches. The sample comprised millennials and their leaders working in level - 5 private hospitals. The sample size was 415 respondents. Five-level multi-stage cluster sampling and purposeful sampling were used. The study findings indicated that individualized consideration and intellectual stimulation influenced millennial dedication. This study has provided actionable insights into leading millennials to safeguard millennial engagement in Kenyan healthcare. Furthermore, to be dedicated, millennials require close monitoring and support. The millennials’ values differ from those of other generations, and they prefer challenges when they get bored with routine work. However, there are two categories of millennials; the older millennials are more responsible and resilient than the younger millennials, who are not dedicated.

The study responded to calls to extend the current understanding of servant leadership into new contexts. The selected context for investigation was the nonprofit sector in Kenya. Three objectives guided the study that sought to establish the servant leadership dimensions adopted, the impact achieved in the target communities and the effect of the dimensions on the level of impact achieved. 365 senior managers were sampled from 73 nonprofit organizations and data was collected on both dimensions of servant leadership and perceived impact in the communities served by the organizations. The study reports that ten attributes of servant leadership are relevant to the sector and are practiced to a moderate extent and this extent of adoption has accomplished a moderate level of impact in the communities served. Four tenets of servant leadership, holistic approach to work, service to others, sense of community and uprightness have a significant effect on the level of impact achieved in the communities. While a holistic approach and service to others have a negative effect, a sense of community and uprightness have a positive effect. The findings raise implications for the servant leadership theory and point to the need to complement its dimensions with the postulates of the situational leadership theory for a more appropriate application in work situations. The findings contribute toward addressing conceptual, theoretical, and empirical gaps found in the extant literature on servant leadership.

This paper aimed to deepen the sense-making of organisational transformation in the banking sector through operationalisation of leadership strategy as the set of policy actions and strategic pursuits. The qualitative data were collected from cumulative 96 annual corporate disclosures of the 12 banks listed in the Nairobi Securities Exchange as of the year 2020 covering 2007 to 2020 and corresponding to specific systemic disruptive events. Data were analysed using thematic content analysis. Two research questions were answered. First, what leadership strategy set do bank executives deploy to achieve organisational transformation? Second, what mechanism explains how leadership strategy translate into organisational transformation? The study found that activation of leadership strategy as an input factor provided a mural for its advancement as a policy tool that can be evaluated in organisational transformation as a manifest output. The study identified a gap in the extant literature that organisational resilience paid limited attention to policy choices and actions deployed to orchestrate organisational transformation as a distinct feature.

The objective of this paper was to present a dynamic resource orchestration framework as a source of organizational resilience through blended orchestration of the firm's dynamic and static resources to generate sustained value during disruptive shocks. We adopted an integrative literature review methodology and proposed a dynamic resource orchestration framework as a managerial option to create and sustain firm value. Conceptually, a dynamic resource orchestration framework was presented as the integration of firm resources and managerial capability. We proposed dynamic resource orchestration as a model input impacting organizational resilience through the combined effects of resource accumulation, resource orchestration, and managerial capabilities. Through a thorough examination of the literature production anchored on dynamic capabilities framework and organizational resilience, we advanced a perspective that the ultimate source of combined firm resilience and sustainable competitive advantage does not necessarily accrue from the resources at a firm's disposal but by how management dynamically blends and orchestrates the existing resources, thereby creating an optimal source of capability. Our proposed conceptualization was based on the assumption that dynamic capabilities are part of firm resources and, therefore, strategic orchestration of dynamic capabilities leads to superior firm resourcefulness and consequential sustained resilience. We identified gaps and proposed directions for future research.

The theory of dynamic resource orchestration explains the differentiated response of homogeneous ecosystem organizations to systemic disruptive shocks. The Covid-19 precautionary measures in Kenya have exempted some essential service providers and government agencies, resulting in a differentiated Covid-19 impact across the national SMEs landscape. This article adopted an extractive thematic analysis technique to draw insights from in-depth interviews and discussions with owners and managers of 6 broad-range SMEs considered non-essential services providers excluded from the Covid-19 cessation of movement waiver. The article advanced insights on SMEs' resilience through dynamic resource orchestration capability. It sought to establish whether the possession and orchestration of dynamic resources capabilities differentiated highly resilient SMEs from non-resilient ones. The article identified business diversification, slack finance, intra-stakeholder collaboration, self-reinvention, positive psychology, technology leverage, and cost management as precursory resilience agents within Kenyan SMEs. Research gaps were identified, and recommendations for future research were proposed.