BACKGROUND OF THE PROBLEM Over the past decades a major shift is believed to have occurred in the way that organizations cope with their environments. Many organizations have increasingly adopted strategic planning due to the increasingly turbulent environment.
Most of the world governments started to implements the strategic planning by reforming their dysfunctional public sectors which were found difficult to deliver adequate services. Strategic planning traces the process which marks a shift from the prescriptive and bureaucratic master planning tradition in a more participatory and mutual ways of working among stakeholders. Strategic Planning replaces a traditional Weberian bureaucratic system of planning of which the planning was strictly a top management activity and did not involve other key stakeholders in the organization, Liduke (2015) Strategic planning in organizations originated in the 1950s and was very popular and widespread between mid-1960s to mid-1970s. During this time, people believed it was the answer for all problems, and corporate America was obsessed with strategic planning. (Mintzberg, 1994) It took time for strategic management to shift into domains other than the military and business worlds due to the fact that the ideas of customers, marketing, market share industry growth and risk management were new to the public sector.
Not surprisingly, strategic planning entered to the public and semi public sectors during the mid-1980s, at a time when the liberal market philosophy began to dominate all management thinking. Pearce and Robinson (1997) observe that all organizations without doubt have to interact with a environment which is changing this means that they have to match between themselves and the environments in which they operates if the organization need to remain stable. In Africa, most countries started to adopt the new approach in early 1990s following the failure of the old bureaucratic model. South Africa and Zimbabwe had adopted the customer- oriented Model involving the use of citizen chartersUganda had promulgated a result oriented management initiative and Tanzania had introduced the quick wins Strategic planning is one of the most accepted methods that organizations take up to create a vision for what they would like to accomplish and a course of action for achieving their vision. Strategic management nowdays is a government- wide reform initiative in Tanzania. In the 1990s, after a substantial period of socio-economic reforms (which started in 1986), the government of Tanzania initiated an expansive public sector reform including the introduction of a strategic management approach that requires all public organizations to adopt strategic management in their management system.
In order to cope with this new policy of adopting strategic management all public organizations are expected to develop long term vision, strategic objectives and establish the required level of resources to accomplish the identified objectives, Sulle (2009) The introduction of strategic management in Tanzania has to be seen as typical reform efforts whose achievement is not dependent only on policy pronouncement but also on the context to which reforms are introduce. STATEMENT OF THE PROBLEM Strategic planning is an organizational management action that is used to set priorities, focus energy and resources, reinforce operations, ensure thatemployees andother stakeholdersare working toward achieving common goals, establish agreementaround the planned outcomes/consequences, assess and adjust the organizations direction in response to a changing environment (https//balancedscorecard.org/Resources/Strategic-Planning-Basics) .Strategic planning enhances better organizational performance, which in the long run has impact on its survival and that strategic planning intensity is determined by managerial, environmental and organizational factors (Taiwo and Idunnu, 2007) The success of an organization depends much on the quality and commitment of its human resources to implement laid down objectives. With strategic planning, organizations are able to identify their development goals and growth options, seem to be deeply into to their opportunities and strategically plan to wholly use the opportunities obtainable. The effectiveness of strategic planning to the attainment of organizational goals and objectives depend much on the extent to which it is integrated to human resource functions. Several studies have been done on strategic planning, for instance Mori (2013),studied about the effectiveness of strategic planning on the performance of SMEs, Liduke (2015) on Staff training on the control of strategic plan implementation and many others, but no one has put his or her effort to study about the integration of human resource functions with strategic planning in achieving organizational objectives.
Therefore the purpose of this study is to examine the extent to which human resource functions is integrated with strategic planning at the University of Dodoma Research Objectives General Objective The main objective of this study is to examine the integration of human resource functions with strategic planning in the University of Dodoma. Specific Objectives i. To examine the extent to which human resource functions is integrated to strategic planning. ii. To examine factors influencing the effectiveness of strategic planning in achieving organizational goals iii. To understand employees awareness on the strategic planning in an organization.
Research questions To what extent is human resource functions is integrated to strategic planning. What are the factors which influence the effectiveness of strategic planning in an organization To what extent employees are aware with the strategic planning of an organization. Y, dXiJ(x(I_TS1EZBmU/xYy5g/GMGeD3Vqq8K)fw9xrxwrTZaGy8IjbRcXIu3KGnD1NIBsRuKV.ELM2fiVvlu8zH(W )6-rCSj id DAIqbJx6kASht(QpmcaSlXP1Mh9MVdDAaVBfJP8AVf 6Q
