Factors Affecting Organizational Effectiveness: A Proposed Framework for Brunei's Public Sector

Introduction

Today’s global economic growth can be characterized by the speed of innovation, dynamic technological advancement, shorter product life-cycles and higher rate of new product development (Islam et al., 2011). Organizations need to reconfigure themselves on an ongoing basis to keep up with these trends to achieve sustainable organizational effectiveness (Mohrman & Lawler, 2014). In simple term, Organizational effectiveness is the extent to which an organization realizes its goals (Daft, 2010). In other words, an organization’s objective achieving ability is known as organizational effectiveness. Though existing literature attempted to explain organizational effectiveness through different contexts or characteristics, still there is no single formula for achieving optimum organizational effectiveness (Zheng et al., 2010). A lack of understanding still prevails regarding the influencing factors and the intervening mechanisms to explain organizational effectiveness comprehensively. This becomes more severe when it comes to understanding the organizational effectiveness in the public sector because it is assumed that same performance will be shown in the public sector as in the private sector, disregarding the immense differences between them (Parhizgari & Gilbert, 2004). For example, one significant difference between them is that the private sector aims mainly for profit, whereas, the public sector aims mainly for social benefit (Mihaiu et al., 2010). Therefore, factors influencing organizational effectiveness may vary in the public sector compared to the private sector. Hence, there is a gap in the literature towards understanding these influencing factors of organizational effectiveness in the public sector. To fill this gap, this study turns to the knowledge-based view of the organization to understand organizational effectiveness in a better way.

Over the last few decades, the global economy is considered to be a knowledge-based economy (Dess et al., 2013). The knowledge-based view of the organization considers knowledge to be the key resource for the organization that creates competitive advantage (Grant, 1996). Though this view mostly concentrates on private sectors, however, there is evidence that the public sector organizations can also be characterized as knowledge-intensive organizations (Willem & Buelens, 2007) because they often develop and provide knowledge as their primary activity (Luen & Al-Hawamdeh, 2001). If public organizations deal in knowledge, then effective knowledge sharing could be the vital element for organizational effectiveness. Usually, public sector managers determine and implement public policies and carry out critical government responsibilities which impact on the public service delivery system. Therefore, it is strategically important to capture the knowledge and competencies of departing employees and transfer to junior employees to ensure efficient public service delivery (Tangaraja et al., 2015). Hence, this study assumes that knowledge sharing among organizational employees could be one of the key factors which would create sustainable organizational effectiveness for the public sector organizations specifically in the context of Brunei Darussalam.