Should I Share or Should I Go? A Study of Tacit Knowledge Sharing Behaviors in Extended Enterprises

This paper proposes to study the management of tacit knowledge within extended enterprises and particularly multinational technology corporations, i.e., companies working on digital software and Internet-related services with a presence in more than one state. Indeed, due to the particular nature of tacit knowledge, human behaviors deployed to share it or on the contrary to retain it are of particular interest in that kind of organizations with not only an international cultural context, but also a highly digital environment.We argue that tacit knowledge management within organizations can be improved if we better understand practices, habits, and behaviors when arises to employees the question of "Should I Share or Should I Go?".In this paper we present a study involving a sample of 88 participants who expressed their tacit knowledge behaviors as employees working in a multinational technology corporation. We identified trends on the importance of tacit knowledge as well as on the role of management and technology in sharing behaviors. Particularly, we observed that the presence of established procedures does not imply positive tacit knowledge sharing behaviors. We finally conclude by sketching future research directions on the observation of this phenomenon.