| Tacit Knowledge and Knowledge Management: The Keys to Sustainable Competitive Advantage |
| | Lubit, Roy Howard | Columbia U. | ed99@columbia.edu | 212-874-6012 |
| | This paper explains the importance of tacit knowledge and knowledge management to the development of inimitable competitive advantages in today's "knowledge economy".
Tacit knowledge, unlike explicit knowledge, ishard to put into words, cannot be learned simply by reading or listening to lectures, and generally develops by long experience under supervision.
It is the foundation of intuition and judgment.
Because it can only be learned by experience, it is very difficult for other firms to copy or otherwise acquire the tacit knowledge held by a firm.
The paper discusses ways in which knowledge management can, however, help to spread tacit knowledge within a firm, thereby making the tacit knowledge the basis for a relatively inimitable competitive advantage.
The paper moves on to discuss how firms often fail to use much of the knowledge held within a firm because people are often reluctant to share their knowledge with others or to use knowledge developed elsewhere.
The paper discusses ways in which knowledge management can facilitate the sharing and transmission of knowledge from where it is held to where it is needed.
The paper suggests an expansive role for knowledge management, and describes ways in which knowledge management can be actively involved in the development of firm strategy (particulary core compentences) and in designing the firm's culture and structure.
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| | Keywords: knowledge management; competitive advantage; organizational learning |
| The Role of Tacit Knowledge in the Team Building Process: Explanations and Interventions |
| | Sherman, Walter Scott | Pepperdine U. | ssherman@pepperdine.edu | (310)-568-5545 |
| | Lacey, Miriam Y. | Pepperdine U. | ssherman@pepperdine.edu | (949)-223-2500 |
| | This paper suggests that teams produce synergistic effects by generating new knowledge through combining prior
explicit and tacit knowledge held by individual team members. We propose that understanding the role of tacit
knowledge in the knowledge creation process may provide added insight into the teambuilding process.
Teambuilding interventions that improve the ability of team members to transfer, capture, and combine tacit
knowledge into new knowledge forms may be a source of sustained competitive advantage for an organization.
This paper examines this issue by first exploring the knowledge creation process and the role of tacit and explicit
knowledge within that process. We then identify a number of contextual issues to the process that can be
augmented by teambuilding. |
| | Keywords: Teambuilding; Tacit Knowledge; Knowledge creation |
| Acceptance of Strategic Vision: An Analysis of the Vision Creation Process |
| | Larwood, Laurie | U. of Nevada | larwood@scs.unr.edu | (775) 329-2952 |
| | Falbe, Cecilia | State U. of New York, Albany | falbe@cnsibm.albany.edu | 518-442-4958 |
| | This article tests research propositions concerning how organizational vision may achieve acceptance. Work reviewed here predicts that the involvement of a broad cross-section of management personnel in creating organizational vision may contribute critically to its acceptance and to the success attributed to it. Creation and dissemination of vision is intensively examined using a cascaded interview technique among the management hierarchies in four organizations.
Results show that involvement in developing the vision predicts both the perception of the vision as stronger along key vision dimensions and acceptance of the vision. Private visions held by managers also converged on the organization’s public vision for those with greater involvement in the vision creation process. Three factors concerning the process of development of vision were isolated, and one of these was found to be important to obtaining acceptance of the vision. Related results indicated that higher level executives saw the vision of their firm as stronger than those lower in the hierarchy and felt more committed to it.
The findings are interpreted as explaining the practical importance of vision in the face of seemingly contradictory earlier literature to the effect that vision is widely accepted by key executives despite having little reliable relationship to bottom line indicators of performance. Suggestions are offered for further research and for implementation of the findings by managers and manageme |
| | Keywords: vision; participation; hierarchy |
| Alternative Practices to Strategic Change Management |
| | Huy, Quy | INSEAD | quy.huy@insead.fr | (33)1 60 72 40 00 |
| | Based on a three-year ethnography of a major strategic change in a large information technology firm,
this article argues that certain Organizational Development (OD) values are relevant for the outcome of
strategic change processes. It questions certain conventional beliefs implied in the strategic change
literature and proposes alternative practices grounded in OD values.
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| | Keywords: Strategic Change; Organizational Development; Beliefs |