The correlation of factors in nature of knowledge and their effects on knowledge transfer in private finance initiative projects

Abstract

This study empirically investigated the nature of the knowledge transfer process between Private Finance Initiative (PFI) partners, which, under a public private partnership arrangement, are from both public and private sector organizations. Most of the previous studies on Public Private Partnerships (PPPs) have focused on the procurement processes, examining specific issues such as risk management, legal aspects, finance and cost planning. This study fills a gap in the literature relating to knowledge transfer between PFI partners in the context of knowledge management, and contributes to the understanding of ways to develop expertise and facilitate improvements at different stages of the PFI process. As causal ambiguity and other antecedents are well recognized as obstacles to knowledge transfer, this study adopted a quantitative methodology to investigate the effects of causal ambiguity, tacitness and complexity on the transfer of knowledge in PFI projects. A questionnaire survey was conducted amongst private and public sector professional practitioners; the 602 valid responses, representing a 30% response rate, were divided almost equally between the two sectors. The statistical analyses found that four out of the six hypotheses of this study were supported. The hypothesis that tacitness of knowledge is negatively related to knowledge transfer was significantly supported but not the casual ambiguity and complexity of the nature of knowledge. It is interesting that within the context of the nature of knowledge, causal ambiguity has a weak effect on knowledge transfer, which may be due to the characteristics of PFI projects that they are new procurement approach; and public and private sectors are not in competition with one another.