The Effect of Deployment Practices on Employees? Performance; A Case Study of Coast Water Services Board

Coast Water Services Board (CWSB) is a state corporation in the Ministry of Water and Irrigation which was established in February 2004 under the legal framework of the Water Act 2002. The CWSB area of jurisdiction covers the six (6) counties in the coast region namely Mombasa, Kilifi, Tana River, Kwale, Lamu and Taita-Taveta, spread over an area of 83, 040 square kilometers. The CWSB headquarters is based in the Mombasa City. The CWSBs mandate is to efficiently and economically provide water and sewerage services within this area of jurisdiction as provided for by section 53 (1) of the Water Act 2002, and as authorized by the Water Services Provision License issued by the Water Services Regulatory Board (WaSREB). CWSB is committed to a set of core values stated in its Strategic Plan that guides not only its ethical practices but also the quality of service delivery and performance standards. These core values are teamwork, integrity, professionalism, accountability, customer focus and integrity. Through support from the World Bank staff of CWSB have been able to benefit in areas such as Training and provision of tools and equipments for operation and maintenance activities. However it has been observed that despite the above interventions the performance of the employees is not as expected. Employee deployment and its subsequent effect on employee performance is an issue of great debate with varying opinions of the same. Due to lack of clear guidelines and systems of deployment, heads of organization may go for individuals who support their administrative styles albeit blindly, or be biased during the deployment exercise, and when this happens, employee morale is affected, and this in turn affects performance. Organizations must ensure that deployments, promotions and demotions, which are elements of employee deployment do not result from a random process but are objective, well planned and purposeful as they greatly influence employee motivation and morale and subsequent performance. Since the ranking of water services regulatory board started on 2008/2009financial year, the performance of CWSB has been declining year after year and the management have not been able to provide concrete answers to this phenomena. Consequently staff deployments have been going on year after year hence a reason good enough to believe it could be the reason behind the declining performance. This study therefore seeks to establish why the performance of Coast Water Services Board is not as expected. Chapter one of this proposal will contain background information on the proposal, statement of the problem explaining briefly what has prompted the necessity to conduct such a research, the research objectives, then the research questions, justification and finally scope of the study. Chapter two will start with theoretical framework, then empirical review, conceptual framework, critique of existing literature, summary and finally research gaps. Finally, chapter three will contain introduction, research design, target population, sampling size, sampling technique, data validity and reliability, data collection tools and procedure, pilot test and data analysis methods. The data collected will be analyzed using both qualitative and quantitative analysis presented in tables and charts extracted from both MS Excel and Statistical Package for Social Studies (SPSS) software tools version 20.