Culture Alignment, Firm size and Sustainable Competitive Advantage among Deposit taking Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies in Kenya

Abstract

Competitive advantage refers to a set of capabilities that permanently enable the business to demonstrate better performance than its competitors. Competitive advantage occurs when an organization acquires or develops an attribute or combination of attributes that allows it to outperform its competitors. Sustainable competitive advantage, refers to the long-term benefits of implementing unique values creating products which competitors cannot implement simultaneously, along with the inability to duplicate the benefits of this strategy. With the changing dynamics in the SACCO sector in Kenya, Managers are so much concerned not just in achieving competitive advantage but also sustaining it for long term benefit. This is can be attained through culture alignment. Culture is a shared common way of being, thinking and acting in a collective and coordinated people with reciprocal expectations in a given society. Organizational culture is set of shared values, beliefs and norms that influence the way employees think feel and behave in the organization on a daily basis, it is a firm’s orientation towards its internal stakeholders, which forms the basic rules that guide employees behaviors, developed and shared within an organization.The purpose of this study was to analyze the relationship between Culture Alignment on Sustainable Competitive Advantage among Deposit taking Savings and Credit Cooperative Societies in Kenya and the moderating effect of firm size on this relationship. This study was anchored on contingency theory and adopted a correlational research design where data was collected only once from the respondents by use of questionnaires from six hundred and fifty six managers of deposit taking SACCOs in Kenya. Statistical package for social sciences (version 23) was used for data analyses. Multi linear regression was used to establish the relationship between the variables and data was presented through descriptive and inferential statistics and all ethical considerations were made. The study found culture alignment has a great influence on sustainable competitive advantage and also revealed a strong positive relationship between culture alignment (R= 0.591) and sustainable competitive advantage of SACCOs in Kenya and that Sustainable competitive can be attained through culture alignment. Moreover, firm size was found to influence this relationship. The study recommends that SACCOs in Kenya should strategically align their culture in order to sustain their competitive advantage and maintain a good market standing as they meet the needs of their stakeholders