The Impact of Adaptive Behavior on Employee Performance in the Ministry of Education Kenya

Abstract

Agility of an employee has been theorized to have linkages with employee performance in commercial business’ setting. Employees who possess adaptive behaviour attributes are professionally flexible, use multiple competencies, have the ability to multitask and normally are able to collaborate with others. When job requirements change, people need to adjust adaptively because it takes more than just picking up new knowledge and abilities. This study investigated the influence of adaptive behavior on employee 39 performance in the Ministry of Education Science and Technology (MoEST) in Kenya. The study was founded on Ability, Motivation and Opportunity (AMO) theory; adopted a positivism research paradigm and a descriptive research design. From a target population of 2116 employees, a sample of 416 employees was drawn using purposive sampling technique. A pilot study was conducted from MoEST employees in Laikipia, Isiolo and Meru counties to pretest data collection instrument. Principal Component analysis (PCA) and test of regression assumptions were carried out before hypothesis testing using a simple linear regression analysis. PCA generated six quality measures for employee adaptive behavior with factor loadings between 0.712 and 0.873. The results indicated that adaptive behavior was associated with R - Square of 0.320, F - statistic of 139.429 and p-value of 0.000, a beta coefficient value of β=0.685 and associated p - value of 0.000.