Effect of Selected Strategic Human Resource Management Practices on Employee Performance at Equator Bottlers Limited in Kisumu

With the development of strategy literature strategic aspect of human resource management in the organizations has been among the most remarkable subjects of research papers. The 21st century companies are keen on human resources as they are the assets for an organization. These assets play a major role towards enhancing the performance of a company. As these companies look towards optimizing their human resources practices, they evaluate solutions that provide strategic human resource/capital management. This well-developed, people-centered approach to business involves a variety of HR-related processes—such as recruiting, on-boarding, payroll, talent management, and others—working together as one, unified ―team‖ to improve the overall health of the organization, by building upon the individual strengths of its people. This study sought to investigate the effect of selected Strategic Human Resource Management practices on employee performance in the Manufacturing Industry, a case study of Equator Bottlers Limited. More specifically the study examined the effect of strategic staffing, strategic training and strategic reward on employee performance in Equator Bottlers Limited. The research was anchored on universalistic and contingency theories. The study adopted a case study with descriptive and cross-sectional research design. The target population of this study were all the 124 employees of Equator Bottlers Limited thus a census sampling method was used. Primary data which was collected by use of questionnaires. The self-administered questionnaire employed the Drop and pick later method. Piloting was done in Rift Valley Bottlers, Eldoret Town, with a sample of 11 employees to ascertain whether the instruments would yield the required data, and to further improve on the data collection instruments. The questionnaire was also tested for validity and reliability. Descriptive (percentages and means) and inferential (correlation and regression) techniques were used to analyze the collected data with the assistance of the Statistical Package for Social Sciences. The three independent variables that were studied (strategic staffing, strategic training and strategic rewarding) explained a substantial 57% of the employee‘s performance in Equator Bottlers Limited as represented by adjusted R2 (0.577). The results further indicate that strategic reward(r=.674, p=.000) indicated the highest association to employee performance, followed by strategic training(r=.459, p=.012) and lastly strategic staffing(r=.443, p=.016). Multiple linear regression analysis using the beta coefficients on the line of best fit pointed out the decision rule was to reject Ho: βi = 0 since the regression coefficients were significantly different from zero and consequently Rejected all the null hypothesis of the study. The study recommends future research to explore these relationships by testing the causal order of employee commitment potentially that could affect perceptions of the system of SHRM practices and superior employees‘ performance. Therefore, the causal order needs to be investigated further