Discussion This study examined the relationships between gender, age, professional tenure and organisational tenure on one hand, and knowledge sharing behaviour on the other. The literature on the relationship between gender and knowledge sharing, whilst limited, would seem to suggest that women should be more inclined to both donate and collect knowledge than men. In this study, however, no statistically significant relationship was identified between gender and knowledge sharing behaviour. This may very well be due to our failure to distinguish between (biological) sex and (psychological) gender. Indeed, in this study, we used gender to refer to biological sex. As noted earlier in this paper, biological sex appears to influence knowledge sharing behaviour indirectly by influencing other variables that themselves influence knowledge sharing behaviour directly. Bem (1974) devised an instrument for measuring psychological gender. Using this often cited instrument, it is possible to classify individuals as sex-typed (i.e. men exhibiting ‘male’ values and women exhibiting ‘female’ values), cross sex-typed (men exhibiting ‘female’ values or women exhibiting ‘male’ values), or androgenous (i.e. individuals showing little difference in their masculinity and feminity scores). Using this instrument, researchers (e.g. Todman and Day, 2006) have shown that in situations where biological sex does not matter, psychological gender does sometimes matter. Conceivably, therefore, psychological gender may be related to knowledge sharing behaviour even if the latter remains unrelated to biological sex. Our findings regarding age and professional tenure, both of which turned out not to be related to knowledge sharing behaviour, are counter intuitive: one would have expected older and more experienced individuals to be eager to donate knowledge to younger and less experienced colleagues; conversely, younger and less experienced teachers were expected to eagerly engage in knowledge collecting. The results obtained in this study may be due to the fact that regardless of their age and professional tenure, teachers tend to have similar educational levels. For that reason, they may all feel that they possess the same level of expertise, and thus have little motivation for knowledge sharing, be it donating or collecting. Furthermore, a lot of the expertise they might require access to is likely to relate to subject content (e.g. Newton’s Third Law of Motion for Physics teachers) that can be obtained from books and other information sources without the knowledge seeking individual necessarily having to consult other colleagues. Knowledge sharing was negatively – albeit weakly related to organisational tenure. This is rather worrying because it suggests that the longer teachers stay at a particular school, the more unwilling they become to share knowledge. A possible explanation for this might be that when teachers initially arrive at a new school, either as new recruits or on transfer, they eagerly share knowledge with their colleagues as they try to find their way around the new environment. In time, however, the enthusiasm for knowledge sharing dies down because of a lack of reprocity on the part of other colleagues, or because of the feeling that knowledge sharing in general is not valued. Conclusions & recommendations This study investigated the relationship between knowledge sharing behaviour and four demographic variables, namely, gender (biological sex), age, organisational tenure and professional tenure. Contrary to the postulated hypotheses, gender, age, and professional tenure were not related to knowledge sharing behaviour, whilst organisational tenure only weakly negatively correlated with knowledge sharing behaviour. Thus, demographic variables do not appear to play any significant role in relation to knowledge sharing behaviour. Nevertheless, given suggestions from the literature that demographic variables do influence knowledge sharing behaviour, it is recommended that further research into the relationship between knowledge sharing behaviour and demographic variables amongst schoolteachers be prosecuted. Future studies should be more comprehensive in terms of the schools and teachers targeted, and also consider the role of other variables, such as a conducive working environment, that might influence how demographic variables interact with knowledge sharing behaviour. Author acknowledgements The work reported in this paper formed part of a doctoral research project undertaken by the first author at the University of Pretoria. The first author wishes to express his gratitude to the University of Botswana which financed the said doctoral study. All the authors would like to express their gratitude to the various officers in the Botswana Ministry of Edcuation for granting the requisite permits that allowed the authors to conduct this study. We would also like to sincerely express our gratitude to the teachers without whose input this study would never have seen the light of day. 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