The purpose of this paper was to explore the opinions of managers regarding the motives behind outsourcing practices in the public sector. Specifically, this paper intended to understand whether managers consider outsourcing as a cost-serving strategy, a strategy to focus on core competencies and or a strategy for enhancing the quality of service delivery. Interview s were conducted with thirty-two (32) public sector managers and fifteen (15) managers from private sectors that were purposefully selected. The results have shown that outsourcing decisions are necessary for complementing knowledge, skill and competence gaps in public service delivery. The managers’ opinions have indicated that outsourcing enables the public sector to focus on their respective core competencies in order to enhance their performances. Moreover, outsourcing decisions reduces operational costs and improves the quality of service delivery in the public sector. The findings imply that decision makers consider outsourcing as a tool to bring about economic, efficiency, effectiveness and equitable service delivery to the public in Tanzania. The limitations of this study are that the data collected from interviews could limit the generalization of the findings because the managers’ opinions may not necessarily be objective hence the results can be largely subjective. The paper recommend s th at future researchers can think of using a large sample and or analyze outsourcing in public sector services from risk-based perspectives .
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