MANAGING ORGANIZATIONAL KNOWLEDGE: BARRIERS TO EFFECTIVE KNOWLEDGE PRODUCTION IN CONTRACTING ORGANIZATIONS

Abstract

During the last few decades, knowledge has been increasingly recognized as an important resource and it has become the central capital and the cost centre of the knowledge intensive economies. The construction industry is knowledge based industry and therefore, production of knowledge is vital for projects and organizations, in order to tackle the fast changes and to be innovative. Promoting the knowledge production and overcoming its barriers will help to enhance their performance, thus to deliver better service to their clients. This paper identifies and examines the barriers for the effective knowledge production within contracting organizations operating in Sri Lanka. This study has examined the barriers in three perspectives: project, organization and industry. The result shows that the ‘Re-inventing the wheel’ syndrome and Ineffective communication system play a major role in inhibiting the knowledge production from projects’ perspective. Time pressure and Reluctance to change & embrace new ideas are the most frequently cited obstacles from organizational cultural aspects. Reluctance to change the routine and Low level of use and exploitation of IT were found to be the main obstacles from industry’s perspective. Further, it was found that the nature of the construction project-based environments creates obstacles to effective knowledge production. In addition, this study has found that knowledge production in the Sri Lankan construction industry seems to focus on project delivery rather than strategic issues. In the main, there appear to be no formal and systematic approach to the production of new knowledge in Sri Lanka. Therefore, this research has made some recommendations to the organizations to prevail over the barriers of knowledge production, thus to remain competitive in the industry.

Keywords: Barriers, Contracting Organizations, Knowledge Production

For full Paper: fmscresearch@sjp.ac.lk