Knowledge Sharing Practices and performance of Public Research Institutions in Kenya.

Abstract

ABSTRACT

In the dynamically changing environment, knowledge is becoming the most important resource for organization performance, even surpassing other resources such as land and capital. Therefore, the ability to retain organizational knowledge is the key characteristic of sustainable improvement in organization performance. On the contrary, publicly funded research institutions in Kenya, lose experts’ knowledge from retiring employees. Knowledge management in publicly funded research institutions in Kenya seems to be a major challenge contributing to poor service delivery and gaps in work performance. Therefore, this study sought to fill the gap by establishing the influence of knowledge sharing practices on performance of publicly funded research institutions in Kenya basing on the knowledge-Based View theory. The study used stratified random approaches to sample 135 respondents out of 6,799 employees in the 12 publicly funded research institutions in Kenya. Both qualitative and quantitative primary as well as secondary data was collected to achieve the study objectives. While qualitative data was analyzed through thematic methods, quantitative data was analyzed using both descriptive statistics (mean scores, percentages and standard deviation) and inferential statistics (Multiple Regression Analysis) through the Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) version 24.0.

The findings indicated that knowledge sharing practices have a positive significant effect on organizational performance which led to the recommendation that the management of the research organizations should promote knowledge sharing by encouraging team members and departments to share their knowledge and expertise with each other. The management of the public research firms should also invest in creating a knowledge sharing culture which allows employees to mentor each other and share their experiences and lessons learned.

Key Words: Knowledge Sharing Practices, Performance of Public Research Institutions, Kenya