Personality traits and the managerial capacity of community-based facilities providing HIV services to key populations in Kenya and Malawi

by Andrea Salas-Ortiz, Marjorie Opuni, José Luis Figueroa, Louis Masankha Banda, Alice Olawo, Spy Munthali, Julius Korir, Barbara Nyambura Thirikwa, Agatha Bula, Navindra Persaud, Sergio A. Bautista-Arredondo Community-based facilities delivering HIV services to key populations often face significant operational and financial challenges, making the quality of management in these organizations particularly important.

A growing body of evidence links management quality to health facility performance. However, research on management in health facilities has focused largely on structural characteristics and formal qualifications, with less attention to the non-cognitive characteristics of managers themselves, particularly personality traits.

This is a cross-sectional, quantitative analysis of 45 facilities providing HIV services to key populations in Kenya and Malawi. The analysis includes two stages.

We first use k-means cluster analysis on management practice data to identify sub-groups of facilities that share similar management profiles. We then use non-linear logit regression models to predict the probability of facilities belonging to each sub-group as a function of manager personality traits, controlling for manager education, experience, and facility location characteristics.

We used the Big Five Inventory to measure personality traits.