INFLUENCE OF TARGET SETTING ON THE PERFORMANCE OF TECHNICAL TRAINING INSTITUTES IN MERU COUNTY, KENYA

Target setting has over the years become a very crucial part of Human Resource Management in organizations and its benefits all over the world cannot be over-emphasized. It is an integrative process involving objective evaluation of employee’s competencies, contributions, improvement opportunities, and potential for future growth in line with organizational objectives. In Kenya, technical training institutes have started carrying out target settings to their employees with the aim of measuring institutional performance from January 2016 as per the requirements of Teacher’s Service Commission to enhance performance of the technical training institutes. The study objective was to establish the influence of target setting on the performance of Technical Training Institutes in Meru County. This study was carried out in the four technical training institutes in Meru County. These are Meru National Polytechnic, Nkabune TTI, Kiirua TTI and Mukiria TTI. All the management employees of the technical training institutes were used as the respondents. There was 74 respondents’ management staff from the 4 technical training institutes in Meru County. It was found that employees are involved in setting targets by their supervisors while a few are not involved in target setting by their supervisors. It is also evident that targets set are not always achievable which affects employees’ performance. It is also evident that employees are never given allowance to negotiate targets with their supervisors which negatively affect their performance. The study recommended that the technical institute management should ensure that the target setting process is fair and inclusive of employees’ views in order to ensure that employees own those targets and strive to achieve them for the benefit of organization performance. JEL: I21, I23, I2