Servant Leadership, Social Innovation, Market Entry Barriers and Sustainability of Pharmaceutical Distributors Targeting Informal Settlement Areas in Nairobi City County, Kenya
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Date
2024-08-14
Authors
Naomi Magunye Gaitho
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Publisher
PAC University
Abstract
The pharmaceutical industry faces market access challenges and its sustainability has been least studied. This study investigated the effect of four components of servant leadership on sustainability of pharmaceutical distributors serving informal settlements in Nairobi City County, Kenya. The study also tested the mediated and moderating effects of social innovation and market entry barriers respectively on this relationship. The first four objectives focused on the effect of each of the four components of servant leadership, while objective five and six focused on the mediating and moderating effects respectively. Four theories anchored the study; namely, the Servant Leadership Theory by Robert Greenleaf, Leader -Member Exchange Theory, the Three-Cycle Model and the Triple-Bottom Line Model. The study adopted a positivist research paradigm which was deployed in the field through a descriptive cross-sectional survey research design. The population of the study was drawn from all pharmaceutical distributors in Nairobi serving informal settlement areas in Nairobi County and the respondents were managers working in those pharmaceutical distributors. 30 pharmaceutical distributors were targeted and a sample of 210 respondents was purposively obtained and provided primary data through a five-point Likert-Scale structured questionnaire The IBM SPSS AMOS software version 21 were used for analysis of both descriptive and inferential statistics. The research obtained a 80% response rate from respondents who had relevant work experience in the industry and had the minimum educational qualifications to work in the industry. The exploratory factor analysis extracted ten components for the servant leadership construct, two for social innovation and four for market entry barriers. For each of the extracted components, the reliability score satisfied the threshold of α=0.7 and the extent of adoption or practice reported at a level of high extent. The three components of sustainability were each attained to a level of high extent. The Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) and path analysis indicated that the constructed paths fitted the data well and that Structural Equation Model (SEM) was suitable for testing the research hypotheses. Empathy and ethical servant leadership have a significant negative statistical effect on sustainability, while even though persuasive mapping and altruistic servant leadership have positive effect on sustainability, the effect is not statistically significant. Social innovation and market entry barriers significantly mediate and moderate respectively the relationship between servant leadership and sustainability. The study concluded that the manner in which servant leadership is deployed determines the extent to which it serves its catalytic role of driving the leadership process in bringing about desired outcomes and that it needs to be configured to serve the leadership process to direct followers to undertake social innovation for the purpose of addressing identified challenges resulting from market entry barriers that present entrepreneurial opportunities to which the core nature of servant leadership of serving others can be directed for exploiting so as to benefit organizations positively. The study raises implications on the need to compliment the Servant Leadership Model with other theoretical frameworks in its application. The study calls on scholars to support in enhancing understanding the nature and operation of servant leadership as well as the industry leaders to strengthen the capacity of staff through awareness programs on the nature and process of leadership. Even though the findings offer useful insights on the manner in which servant leadership can be applied to bring about positive organizational outcomes in an emerging economy context, the study calls for future research to extend the scholarship in the pharmaceutical industry by integrating other theoretical frameworks, emerging economy institutional contexts and adoption of mixed methods designs that permit use of both qualitative and quantitative data in a single study.