Assessment of the Level of Knowledge of Non-Scientists on Nuclear Technologies and their Applications at the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission

Abstract

Given the critical role employee's knowledge about an organization's brand play in this ever-changing competitive environment, there is an increasing demand for organizations to find creative ways to engage employees to properly and adequately represent and promote the brand. These enquiries to understand and find creative ways to effectively engage employees and cultivate employees' knowledge of an organization's brand to remain competitive have mostly been focused on transformational leadership style, trade and industries, etc., at the neglect of nuclear science and other scientific fields of endeavours. Consequently, stakeholders of these scientific institutions such as the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission (GAEC), are not aware and in some cases not well-informed about the exploits of the Commission and for that matter, the benefits stakeholders can derive from its nuclear technologies. Moreover, despite some level of media engagements by the Commission, there are clarion calls for the Commission to promote and publicize its endeavours, nuclear technologies and other related technologies. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to ascertain the strength of the employee-based brand equity of the Commission, by assessing non-scientists level of knowledge about nuclear technologies and their applications at the Ghana Atomic Energy Commission to determine their ability and suitability to help promote the GAEC brand and its technologies. To achieve this a quantitative research method was used for the data collection. One hundred and fifty questionnaires were administered in a survey and a total of 110 questionnaires were successfully retrieved, accounting for 75.8% of the total administered questionnaires. It was found that GAEC had a blend of communication channels for reaching its staff. Additionally, the Commission undertakes employee engagements on nuclear technologies. Except that the current approach of employee engagements is considered not to be effective. As a result, the overwhelming majority of non-scientific staff lacked knowledge of the Commission's mission statement and corporate values. Besides, more than half of the non-scientific staff had limited information on nuclear technologies of the Commission. Importantly, the findings revealed that the non-scientists were aware of their current predicaments of not having adequate knowledge of the Commission's brand and its nuclear technologies and therefore proffered ways to improve their knowledge of nuclear technologies.