Influence of Performance Contracting on Customer Satisfaction in Public Universities, Kenya

The Government of Kenya introduced Performance Contracting (PC) in the public service as one of the tools to improve service delivery. The public service is confronted with many challenges that constrain customer satisfaction as an indicator of service delivery. The study was guided by the following objective: To evaluate the effectiveness of performance contracting on customer satisfaction in the public universities in Kenya, The study was based on the assumption that all the respondents were aware of the government policies on performance contracting in public universities. The study used descriptive survey research design and the target population for the study was 132,021 subjects comprising of 84,290 students, 15,937 academic staff, 31,789 non-teaching staff and 05 directors of performance contracting in the five public universities. For a population of 132,016 subjects, a normal sample size of 384 respondents was appropriate for the study but 507 respondents were used to take care of attrition. Purposive sampling was used to select the directors of performance contracting and simple random sampling and stratified sampling to select academic staff, nonacademic staff and students. Questionnaires for the staff and students and interview schedule for director performance were used for data collection. Piloting of the instruments was done in three public universities which had similar characteristics with the sampled universities. Reliability of the instruments results was tested using split half technique and Cronbach formula was used to compute reliability. Reliability coefficient of the academic staff, non-academic staffs, directors of performance contracting and students were found to be, 0.81, 0.78, 0.73 and 0.79 respectively. Data was analyzed with the help of Statistical Package for Social Sciences version 18. Descriptive statistics used for data analyses were mean and standard deviation and inferential statistics used was Pearson’s Product Moment Correlation and regression analysis. The study achieved a response rate of 93%. The study established a positive correlation between the effectiveness of performance contracting and customer satisfaction with r= 0.588 from the staff respondents and r= 0.468 from students respondents. Therefore, the study concludes that there is a strong positive association between performance contracting and customer satisfaction in the public universities in Kenya. The study recommended that the public universities should reward staff that performs well as part of customer satisfaction. The findings of the study could be significant to policy makers in performance contracting to come up with improved models of improving customer satisfaction in public sector and public universities. The study could also provide university management with data that can help strengthen customer satisfaction in universities. Keywords: Performance Contracting, Customer Satisfactio