THE BARRIERS TO KNOWLEDGE SHARING PRACTICES IN NIGERIAN CONSTRUCTION FIRMS

Abstract

Knowledge is scattered in the construction organizations through various documents and individual brains without a platform to retrieving it for sharing among the employees due to barriers. Therefore, the aim of this paper is to establish the barriers to knowledge sharing practice in Nigerian construction firms. The questionnaire survey approach was adopted due to the nature and type of data required.  150 numbers of questionnaires were distributed to Engineers, Quantity Surveyors, Architects, and Builders. The descriptive method of analysis was adopted for data analysis.  The result shows the followings as main barriers to knowledge sharing practice in Nigerian construction firms. These are (1) funding, (2) leadership commitment, (3) incentives and reward systems, (4) trust between colleagues, (5) organizational culture, (6) time factor and (7) awareness of benefits of knowledge sharing. The paper, therefore, suggests that the leaders of the construction firms should develop a proactive management strategy that will facilitate the practices of knowledge sharing by means of introducing incentive and rewards system, establish trust, create time and knowledge protection for the specialists.