Institutional Strategies and Collective Bargaining Agreements in the Tea Industry: A Case of James Finlay Company Limited Kericho County, Kenya

Abstract

Collective Bargaining takes many different forms and takes place at different levels. Whereas Collective Bargaining can be adversarial, it is effective in building trust between parties and the resultant agreement should bind the signatories and those on whose behalf it is concluded. There has been misinterpretation of collective bargaining as a forum for negotiating salary reviews, Lack of or inadequate training in negotiation skills, the inability of negotiators from both sides to identify easy tradeoffs among the terms being negotiated, tendency to use collective bargaining process as a platform for political activism etc. The general objective of this study was to investigate the influence of institutional strategies on collective bargaining agreement. The purpose of the study was to determine the effect of Institutional strategies on collective bargaining agreements in a tea industry a case of James Finlay Limited, Kericho County. The study used descriptive survey research design as it sought to describe data and characteristics about the population or phenomenon being studied. The target population comprised of 123 respondents from five Departments in James Finlay Company Limited. Primary data was collected for the purpose of this study and analysed using descriptive statistics. Stratified sampling technique was used to select the sample. Simple random sampling method was used to select the sampled employees. Taro Yamane’s formula was used to determine the sample size for the study. The sample size used was 94 respondents which made up for 0.76% of the target population (123). Both qualitative and quantitative data were collected. Data collection was through self administered questionnaires. The study was composed of respondents from different age gaps whose cumulative frequency show that 79.5% of the respondents were aged 36 years and above. The findings also showed that 64.1% were female and 35.9% were male. The findings further showed that majority of the respondents had attained a high level of education whose cumulative frequency was 65.4% of the respondents who had attained a Bachelor’s degree level of education and above. The study established that alternative dispute resolution strategy, human capital development strategy and participatory management strategy had a positive and significant effect on collective bargaining agreement. The study concluded that alternative conflict management that seeks to address the question of how people can make better decisions together, particularly on difficult, contentious issues. The main theoretical framework of the study was guided by theories of human capital, Mary parker Follett’s conflict management, stakeholder theory and Michael porter’s competitive analysis model theory. The study recommends that organizations should adopt negotiation, mediation and arbitration methods as alternative conflict resolution strategies because they usually take far less time to reach a final resolution than if the matter were to go to trial by way of litigation.