Employee perception of knowledge management practices: A case study of British American Tobacco Kenya

Abstract

The economy oftoday has been described as a 'Knowledge economy', pointing to the reality that knowledge has become a major source of competitive advantage. Knowledge has displaced capital, natural resources and labour as the essential economic resources. With shortening product and service life cycles, knowledge integration undergrids the organisations' ability to ask the right questions and turn tacit knowledge into market offerings. Organisations must now harness their systems of acquiring, developing, sharing and retaining knowledge. The systems should encourage and reward employees who collaborate, learn and work as teams. The study was carried out at British American Tobacco Kenya (BA T).It set out to find out the perception of BAT employees concerning the Knowledge management practices in the organisation. A structured questionnaire was administered to both Management and Non Management staff and their perceptions captured for analysis. The results show that to a large extent, the employees perceive the company to have embraced knowledge management practices, despite not having a fully fledged Knowledge Manager. Employees believe that opportunities exist for continuous learning, dialogue is promoted and they are empowered to learn. They however see some opportunities for improvement in the area of knowledge sharing specifically with respect to access to internet.