Functional Boundaries as a Tacit Knowledge Sharing Factor and Its Effect on Public Sector Performance in Kenya

Abstract

Knowledge is a crucial component in the growth of any organization and it forms a significant fraction of all the resources required for organizational growth. Out of the renowned factors of production namely land, labor, capital, entrepreneur and management, three out of the five factors (60%) are human factors (resource) which are actually the main drivers of knowledge management and tacit knowledge sharing. The world revolution has seen economies come from reliance on land ownership (the agricultural age), where the backbone of the economy is purely agriculture, through to the industrial age (reliance on industrialization) and now is the knowledge focus (reliance on knowledge gathering, acquisition and storage as a competitive advantage) which is the third wave of human socio-economic development. In a knowledge society, the basic economic resource is no longer capital, or natural resources or even labour, but knowledge. Knowledge is now recognized as a resource that is at par with other economic resources. It is noted that in the knowledge age, 2% of the working population will work on the land (agriculture), 10% will work in the industry (industrialization) and the rest will be in knowledge (tacit). In the Kenyan civil service, there seems to be ignorance in the amount of knowledge that flows through the Kenyan civil service every day. Chief among the reasons for this scenario is strong hierarchical (functional boundaries or strict demarcations), and bureaucracies that impede generation, distribution and sharing of knowledge and information. The performance of the Kenya public sector had failed to meet the stipulated targets as was indicated by the performance of the economic, social and other sectors in the year 2012 and 2013. In addition, empirical evidence reveals that there is a lacuna in the studies associated with tacit knowledge sharing and performance of the public sector in Kenya. The study therefore focuses on the influence of functional boundaries as a factor of tacit knowledge sharing and how they affect public sector performance in Kenya.