Knowledge Sharing in Organisations: Finding a Best-fit Model for a Regulatory Authority in East Africa

Knowledge is an essential organisational asset that contributes to organisational effectiveness when carefully managed. Knowledge sharing (KS) is a vital component of knowledge management that allows individuals to engage in new knowledge creation. Until it’s shared, knowledge is considered useless since it resides within the human brain. Public organisations specifically, are more involved in providing and developing knowledge and hence can be classified as knowledge-intensive organisations. Scholarly research conducted on KS has proposed a number of models to help understand the KS process between individuals but none of these models is specifically for a public organisation. Moreover, to really reap the benefits that KS brings to an organization, it’s imperative to apply a model that is attributable to the unique characteristics of that organisation. This study reviews literature from electronic databases that discuss models of KS between individuals. Factors that influence KS under each model were isolated and the extent of each of their influence on KS in a public organization context, were critically analysed. The result of this analysis gave rise to factors that were thought to be most critical in understanding KS process in a public sector setting. These factors were then used to develop a KS model by categorizing them into themes including organisational culture, motivation to share and opportunity to share. From these themes, a KS model was developed and proposed for KS in a medicines regulatory authority in East Africa. The project recommends that an empirical study be conducted to validate the applicability of the proposed KS model at a medicines regulatory authority in East Africa