Abstract:
Strategic partnership is necessitated by the need for an organization to achieve its
goals while leveraging on resources of another organization. Strategic partnership
can be viewed as a tool for competitive advantage as firms utilize each other’s
core competence and specialization to support the competitiveness of the activities
concerned. This study sought to establish the influence of transient advantage
on performance specifically, the role of strategic partnerships on performance of
private health insurance companies. The dynamic capabilities view of the firm
and institutional theory were used to anchor the study while a descriptive survey
design was adopted in the study targeting a population comprising managers,
assistant managers and supervisors. Four respondents were drawn from each of the
five departments, namely sales, strategy, finance, operations and customer service
departments in the 19 private insurance companies where data was collected from
a sample of 308 out of the 380 that were targeted. The analyzed data found that
strategic partnerships did not significantly (p >0.05) predict performance of
private health insurance sector in Kenya. Strategic partnerships had positive but
insignificant predictive power on performance. It was recommended that firms
should strengthen these dynamic capabilities to level where their influence on
performance can be significant and health insurance firms should strategically
partner with entities that share the same goals and objectives and are culturally
compatible.
