Abstract
Is knowledge considered a valuable asset in public sector? Most of the answers of top public managers would be yes to this question; however it is quite rare to see a public organisation with software systems to manage their knowledge repositories. Even top management support and the latest information technologies tools may not be enough to create an effective and efficient online tacit knowledge sharing (OTKS) system, as the case happened in Turkish Statistical Institute (TurkStat), a large public organisation from Turkey. Even though the strategic decisions about OTKS are made by top managers, the success of these strategies depends on OTKS behaviour of employees.
This article, therefore, proposed a framework and reports the results of an exploratory study based on an in-depth qualitative investigation of factors influence OTKS behaviour of not only public managers but also public employees (n=50) of TurkStat. The results indicated that the OTKS platform was mostly used by the younger and well educated public employees. Apart from that nine out of a total number of sixteen OTKS factors were considered significant by public employees and the top management. Interestingly the public officers and the public managers, as two parties, considered the other party had more responsibility and impact on fostering OTKS. Moreover, each OTKS factor had considerable different significance levels for the managers and the employees. This paper is one of the first studies to explore the factors influence OTKS in a Turkish public sector institution from two different hierarchical perspectives.