Staff Incentives and Implementation of Financial Inclusion Strategy by Insurance Firms in Kenya

Strategy implementation presents the greatest challenge to organisations for various reasons one among them being insufficient alignment of staff incentives with the strategy to be implemented. The aim of this study was to examine the relationship between strategic staff incentives and performance of insurance firms in Kenya specifically focusing on financial inclusion strategy. Drawing from the Herzberg’s two-factor theory, a cross-sectional survey of 48 permanent employees from 12 insurance firms was conducted using structured questionnaires in order to ascertain the relationship between strategic staff incentives comprising pay, oversight, meaningfulness of work, employee growth and job security are applied and how they relate to the level of performance as observed through the extent of financial inclusion indicators measured by access, usage, financial literacy and quality of service attained by these firms. The questionnaire items were anchored on a five-point Likert scale from 1=very dissatisfied to 5=very satisfied. It was found that the employees were dissatisfied with pay (M=2.53) and growth opportunities (M=2.56) and only moderately agreed that their jobs were meaningful (M=3.85) and secure (M=3.83); and that oversight (M=3.54) was also moderately satisfactory. It was further found that both oversight and job security were significantly related with financial inclusion indicators, namely financial literacy and quality of financial services (Oversight/Financial literacy: r = 0.398, p =0.04 <0.05; Job security/ Quality: r = 0.414, p=0.029 < 0.05). Oversight was also found to be significantly related with quality of service at p <0.1 (Oversight/quality: r = 0.32, p =0.09< 0.1). Based on these findings, it is recommended that management in insurance firms focus on providing effective oversight of staff because it had the most significant relationship with financial inclusion indicators. Similarly, job security should be ensured since it positively predicted quality of financial services provided by the insurance firms. Further, insurance companies should improve on their staff incentives since they were found to be largely unsatisfactory as reported by the survey respondents.