An Empirical Assessment of Adoption and Innovation of the Portable Banking Technology in Kenya
The study investigated the appropriateness of innovation diffusion in understanding and explaining the adoption rate and acceptability of portable bank...
The objective of this paper was to present 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 dynamic resource orchestration framework as a managerial option to create and sustain firm value. Conceptually, 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 direction for future research.
This paper aims to examine how the construct of resilience is currently defined and propose a more comprehensive and unidirectional definition, conceptualization, and operationalization for the construct. We applied a rigorous systematic literature review in line with Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-analyses (PRISMA) selection criteria covering historical currency, topical relevance, and publication appropriateness. We reviewed 1490 articles and publications on organizational resilience generated from a combination of academic databases and search engines. We identified the points of convergence and divergence in the definitions and discussed the implications for theorizing organizational resilience. The thematic descriptive extracted from the selected articles were cross-validated from comparable peer-reviewed papers included in this study. The article departed from common knowledge that organizational resilience is still evolving, and a unified definition is necessary to guide future scholarly works. We attempted to provide a current answer to the question, what is organizational resilience. We proposed that organizational resilience is the process and outcome of strategic preparedness for an adaptive response to disruptive shocks, capitalization on disruptive shocks, instinctive survival, positive transformation, and prosperity through disruptive shocks. We further proposed a conceptual model to illustrate our ideas. This article contributed to the ongoing debate on how organizational resilience should be defined and conceptualized using the most updated systematic review reporting framework.
The study investigated the appropriateness of innovation diffusion in understanding and explaining the adoption rate and acceptability of portable bank technology in Kenya through the assessment of the factors that influence the adoption of portable banking technology. The study employed a sample of 115 portable bank technology adopters based on a purposive sampling technique and tested the five attributes of innovations, namely relative advantage, compatibility, complexity, trialability, and observability. The study found that relative advantage, compatibility, Trialability, and observability positively impact adoption. Trialability and complexity were found to have a lesser significant effect on adoption. Complexity hurts adoption. More specifically, the regression model revealed that compatibility is the most significant determinant of adopting portable bank technology with t=4.21 and p ≤ 0.001. Trialability has a significant positive impact on adoption with t= 4.27 and p ≤ 0.001. Observability has a high explanatory value with t = 4.45 and p ≤ 0.001. Relative advantage has returned a positive explanatory coefficient at t=4.50 and p ≤ 0.001. Finally, Complexity had no significant impact on the adoption of portable banking technology. The study has uncovered useful trends in portable bank technology adoption in Kenya. The study recommended that future research should focus on broader variables and carry out comparative studies on both homogeneous and heterogeneous settings to gauge the net effect of technical attributes on technology adoption.
The financial system in any country plays a critical role in facilitating payment and providing policy and performance anchors to the economy. Therefore, systemic financial distress manifests in industry level financial distress by front-hitting the financial system first. Financial organizations’ failure triggers a domino effect on the whole ecosystem, and therefore financial institutions enjoy various layers of protection when their operations show signs of distress. Several financial industry players worldwide have experienced financial distress in one form or another during episodes of systemic crisis such as the 2008 international financial crisis. Although the distress might not have necessarily led to bankruptcy or liquidation in some cases, it left several questions unanswered, particularly with respect to a leadership role, ecosystem contingencies, and the recovery mechanism. This study scanned recent extant literature on organizational financial distress and identified essential gaps for future research. The study provided a holistic review of antecedents, outcomes, and intra-industry characteristics of financial distress. The study found that the leadership role as an orchestrative agent in an organizational ecosystem has not been adequately addressed in the extant literature. The study contributes to the literature by clarifying leadership aspects of systemic financial distress by placing leadership within the core of the financial ecosystem before, during, and after distress. Outcomes and recommendations for future research are proposed.
This paper aimed to define, operationalise, and generate measures of leadership strategy that can inform future empirical enquiry and analysis. In addition, the paper aimed to provide a conceptualisation of the notion of leadership strategy, situating the concept within the broader leadership strategy literature from which a working definition of leadership strategy is coined. From the definition, leadership strategy was then operationalised by developing a set of items that can be used to measure it. The items were subsequently subjected to empirical evaluation and testing within the context of the banking sector in Kenya. Using SmartPLS software, Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) were performed on questionnaire data collected online from 184 senior managers of 12 banks listed in the Nairobi Securities Exchange. The factors or indicators were validated with high scores of exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. All factors/indicators were validated and found to be consistently above theoretical thresholds. The study proposed an inventory for measuring leadership strategy using 24 Likert-scale items based on the empirical results. It is worth mentioning that while the items were validated in the banking sector context, each item is a generic measure of the corresponding factors and can be adapted for use in other research contexts. The paper established an empirical lead towards the proposition of an inventory for the construct of leadership strategy.
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.
Dynamic Capabilities View (DCV) has an illustrious history of shaping strategic management thinking. However, with the increased frequency of systemic disruption episodes, alternative postulations emerge that promise a more robust explanation for organisational sustainability. The Dynamic Resource Orchestration View (DROV) is the latest evolution in theory development, extending the Dynamic Resource-Based View (DRBV). As a framework, it elevates leadership strategy as a superordinate resource, with dynamic resource orchestration, rather than resource base, as the differentiating factor that sets resilient organisations apart in systemic disruptions. The present study utilised the lenses of DROV to mine the perspectives of 13 Kenyan ex-bankers on dynamic resource orchestration at the intersection of strategy-induced organisational resilience. The results provided empirical validation of the robustness of DROV in explaining strategy-induced organisational resilience, with dynamic resource orchestration as a source of differentiation for sustainable competitive advantage (SCA). The study has effectively contributed to strategic management scholarship by underscoring the critical role of leadership strategy, decisions and actions in the organisational resilience– SCA equation. It has also highlighted the attributes that characterise high resilience organisations (prospering or capitalising organisations), moderate-resilience organisations (surviving organisations) and low-resilience organisations (struggling organisations). A conceptual illustration for deepening research on the novelty, dimensionality and utility of DROV is provided.
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 present study aimed to enrich knowledge production by developing and validating a tool for measuring the resource orchestration construct. Resource orchestration theory is increasingly staking its claim in management literature as an emergent theory for explaining how corporate strategy is translated into organisational outcomes. However, the lack of applicability and empirical validity is one of its most glaring shortcomings. As such, while the theory has inspired a growing body of research, knowledge production has been fraught with limited comparability due to a dearth of empirically validated measurement tools. We embarked on this task by critically reviewing extant literature on the definition, conceptualisation, dimensionalisation and measurement of the construct as an essential first step. We also examined conceptual models used in prior research. We then outlined our methodology to develop an inventory for the resource orchestration construct. We concluded the study by presenting and discussing our analysis of data. Lastly, we proposed future research trajectories. This paper proposed empirically validated resource orchestration inventory as a novel contribution to knowledge.
Today’s business world seems to be constantly battling to make sense of things in the same way the Russia-Ukraine conflict takes other dangerously precarious levels. Nonetheless, the Ukraine-Russia conflict could offer a rich ground for making sense of the complex dimensions of being resilient or attempting to be resilient in the face of the unpredictable trajectory of events. The prolonged standoff of Ukraine against Russia despite asset differential, ceteris paribus, explains, to some extent, both the intricate nature and the importance of being resilient. Ukraine has demonstrated daring tenacity to hold off and prolong the conflict. The general organisational resilience scholarship has inspired the development of various conceptual models and postulations, one of which is anchoring organisational resilience on a Dynamic Resource Orchestration Framework. This article builds on these developments to advance a theoretical argument that resilience power resides in dynamic resource differential. An integrative desk review methodology was employed. A stringent keyword search criteria were imposed on advanced Google search by combining the term “resilience” or “resilient” with “Ukraine”. The initial search generated 669 hits. Further scrutiny of the article titles was examined for relevance and content for supporting facts. Inclusion criteria comprised disclosed author and evidence of use of the scientific methodology. This yielded a purposive sample of nine articles rich in content. The articles were examined for Ukraine’s resilience themes which were analysed in terms of organisational parallels. The study has delineated six dynamic resource differentials that underpin Ukraine’s resilience with practical significance to the business world. They are in order of priority, psychological capital, adaptive innovation, empowering leadership, strategic resilience, robustness and vigilance. The six dynamic resource differentials are largely of human resource nature than they are material resources. Each resilience factor is facilitative and interlinked in that none is stand-alone. A conceptual model of organisational resilience factors to hostile disruption has been proposed.
Growing scholarly works have put forward various concepts and theoretical frameworks for explaining organisational resilience. The vastness of ideas epitomises the central place organisational resilience has occupied in modern management discourse. However, whereas extant scholarship is foundational to sense-making, available theoretical frameworks advance multiple organisational resilience pathways, leading to more confusion than clarity. This paper gathers and interrogates disparate and complementary ideas propounded in past scholarly works toward developing a base theory that can advance organisational resilience research across sectors. The paper adapts a meta-integration research framework to synthesise general knowledge to develop a coherent theory. The paper’s main aim was to decant the mix of factors that form the core elements that remain constant for all resilient organisations irrespective of external conditions. Results point to the phenomenon of organisational resilience as a complex moving target. The paper theorises that underlying complexity and dynamism are essential elements that characterise all resilient organisations, whichever the context. Accordingly, the paper draws off four resilience constants: resilience thinking, dynamic slack building, dynamic resource orchestration, and post-shock learning. Support for a theory of Organisational Resilience Constants has been found in various anchor frameworks and empirical studies. Thus, the contribution of this paper to knowledge is the demarcation of the essential characteristic of resilient organisations from the vast maze of resilience features. This notion of Organisational Resilience Constants opens the opportunity for further scholarly scrutiny in the ongoing struggle for coherence.
Organisational resilience has taken centre stage in management scholarship in recent years. However, primary research into the construct of resilience and its drivers points to a literature production deficit on the application of mixed methods design into the research stream. This paper aims to advance mixed methods as a pragmatic design and illustrate its practical application in business research using Kenya’s banking sector as a case study. The paper is a spinoff from the author’s doctoral dissertation that aimed to advance a Kenya-African context of the leadership strategy – organisational resilience nexus with firm-intrinsic values as intermediaries. The study involved mixing the collection and analysis of both qualitative and quantitative data drawn from primary and secondary data sources. In the dissertation, qualitative data was sourced from both in-depth interviews and the chairman/CEO statements section of annual reports. Quantitative data was the result of the administration of an online questionnaire survey. These were then analysed following the convergent-parallel approach. Thus, the paper has shown how three data collection methods and two variants of data type were integrated into a unified whole. Decisions taken at every step, from paradigm selection, research and sampling design choices, data collection and analysis methods, and ethical considerations, have been articulated and justified. A mixed research design conferred multiple advantages that would not have otherwise been enjoyed using exclusionary research paradigms, as the researcher could test hypotheses without overlooking the contextual themes and nuances underlying the data. The corroborative value of qualitative methods to quantitative approaches and the resultant comprehensiveness of conclusions drawn is perhaps the most significant practical advantage of employing mixed methods design for organisational resilience research. The psycho-sociotechnical nature of organisational resilience makes mixed methods the most robust research design and pragmatism the ideal paradigm.
A global health pandemic known as Covid-19 occasioned economic shocks that would go down in history as the worst disruption of the socioeconomic systems worldwide. Yet banks worldwide have not only demonstrated resilience but have themselves been an oasis of resilience for the economy and businesses. This phenomenon has attracted much scholarly interest, as evidenced by a growing stream of literature production. However, the empirical literature provides disparate explanations that create more questions than answers. Banks in the Global South, in general, and Africa in particular, are in a comparatively vulnerable position owing to capital inadequacy and underdeveloped regulatory regimes that make their resilience against the Covid-19-induced economic disruption an unresolved puzzle. While the post-Covid era has left most banks encumbered with anaemic profitability and eroded portfolio quality, the banking sector in the Global South has staved off collapse to post a positive growth begs for scientific inquiry that the scholarly world has not adequately addressed. Against the backdrop of empirical ambiguity, this paper evaluates the impact of systemic disruptive episodes on bank resilience using the Kenyan banking sector as the research context. The main objective of this article was to establish the impact of systemic disruptive shocks on the resilience of the Kenyan banking sector using evidence from financial reports. A secondary objective of the analysis was to provide a non-western empirical explanation for the sanguine posture of banking sector resilience in the Global South. Quantitative research design and methodology were used to estimate bank resilience and its drivers in Kenya. Secondary data in the form of annual reports of commercial banks was used as the data source. The data scope covered the 2008 global financial crisis and the Covid-19 outbreak. The data scope spanned income, leverage, assets and asset turnover as dimensions of resilience metrics. Results show that the post-2008 global recession era has been characterised by concerted efforts by the banking sector players to enhance capital adequacy by building Tier 1 capital base. Less resilient banks took a recession posture, with a southbound asset turnover trend. In contrast, highly resilient banks were on a positive asset and income growth trajectory. No material impact of systemic disruptive shocks was reflected in the financial metrics of Kenya’s listed banks.
The study investigated the appropriateness of innovation diffusion in understanding and explaining the adoption rate and acceptability of portable bank...
The study investigated the appropriateness of innovation diffusion in understanding and explaining the adoption rate and acceptability of portable bank...
The study investigated the appropriateness of innovation diffusion in understanding and explaining the adoption rate and acceptability of portable bank...