The Moderating Role of Project Team Dynamics on the Relationship between Monitoring and Evaluation Practices and Performance of Smallholder Tea Farming Project in Nyamira County, Kenya

Tea is a vital cash crop for smallholder farmers in Kenya, serving as a primary driver of rural economic stability. There is a significant lack of research on the topic of how project team dynamics affect monitoring and evaluation (M&E) practices, which leads to underperforming projects. This is because researchers have mostly ignored the socio-technical complexities of team interaction and the performance of the smallholder tea farming sector. To fill this need, researchers in this study looked at a smallholder tea growing project in Kenya's Nyamira County to see how team dynamics affected the correlation between M&E practices and project success. This study highlights the role of poor team dynamics as a non-physical barrier that reduces the influence of monitoring and evaluation practices on the performance of smallholder tea farming sectors. It draws on the Theory of Constraints (ToC) to support this claim. We used standardised questionnaires and interview schedules to gather data from 379 smallholder tea growers who were not biassed. The study was based on a descriptive survey approach. Statistical analysis conducted through SPSS employed moderated hierarchical regression to test the interaction effects. The results demonstrate that while budgetary allocation for M&E is a statistically significant predictor of project performance, its influence is substantially magnified by positive project team dynamics. These findings contribute to the management discipline by shifting the discourse from a purely resource-based view of M&E to a more integrative perspective that values human capital synergy as a critical success factor for agricultural sustainability.