SHARING KNOWLEDGE WITHIN THE KINGDOM OF SAUDI ARABIA CONSTRUCTION ORGANISATIONS

Abstract

An increasing number of Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA) construction organisations are turning to knowledge sharing as a key to leverage their distinctive core competencies in their pursuit of competitive advantage. However, the construction industry is one of the most challenging environments in which managing people effectively in order to ensure that they contribute their knowledge to organisational success. Knowledge sharing is one of the building blocks for an organisation’s success and acts as a survival strategy in this knowledge era. Sharing project experience and knowledge among project staff will: reduce the cost of problem solving; and decrease the probability of repeat problems. In other words, sharing knowledge leads to faster response times which help firms meet construction requirements with lower operational costs. There is, however, knowledge sharing is an under-researched area in the KSA construction industry context, despite several policy transformations announced by the KSA Government. Thus, the main aim of this was to investigate how the KSA construction organisations are sharing knowledge en-route to organisational competitiveness. The findings are in the main, based on semi-structured interviews with 44 professionals.