Strategic Business Management Practices and Organizational Sustainability: The Role of Human Capital Development in Kenyan Enterprises

Abstract

Tonny Odhiambo

Background: Kenyan enterprises operate in volatile, resource-constrained markets in which strategic business management practices are widely promoted, yet the mechanisms that convert strategic intent into durable, multidimensional organizational sustainability remain under-specified.

Purpose: This article examines whether, and through which mechanisms, human capital development (HCD) explains the relationship between strategic business management practices and organizational sustainability in Kenyan enterprises.

Methods: A theory-building integrative review was conducted, synthesizing landmark and recent scholarship from the resource-based view, strategic human capital and strategic human resource management research, dynamic-capabilities and knowledge-based theory, sustainable HRM, and Kenyan and wider African management studies.

Findings: The synthesis indicates that HCD is best conceptualized not as a stand-alone HR activity but as the transmission mechanism through which strategic management practices generate operational capability. Four mechanisms are identified: strategy-aligned skill and knowledge accumulation, the emergence of firm-specific human capital resources, dynamic-capability formation, and stakeholder-oriented (sustainable) HRM. These are integrated in a multilevel conceptual framework with seven testable propositions and four classes of boundary condition specific to the Kenyan context: firm size and formality, environmental dynamism, labour-market mobility and appropriation risk, and institutional context.

Conclusion: Kenyan enterprises are likely to realize sustainability benefits from strategic management only when HCD is deliberately aligned with strategy, protected against appropriation through retention-oriented architectures, and evaluated against economic, social and environmental outcomes. The paper offers measurement guidance and a research agenda for confirmatory, multi-source, longitudinal testing.

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