Tacit Knowledge Transfer For Managerial Positions – Suggested Design For Higher Education Institutions

Tacit knowledge utilization and transfer in organizations are critical for maintaining a competitive advantage and for successful coopetition, in the case of educational institutions. Acquiring, extracting and transferring tacit knowledge are difficult tasks, due to the complexity of the tacit knowledge itself, to the myriad of influence factors and the lack of appropriate methods for particular contexts. The process is even more difficult when the tacit knowledge transfer takes place – or should take place – at power level, for various managerial positions – yet without such a transfer, valuable time and resources are wasted (not all transferred experiences have to be used, some might need to be unlearned!). Higher education institutions are the forefront of knowledge transfer, yet preaching and living the preached values remains a delicate endeavor, especially during crises. The present study, conceptual and exploratory in nature, aims to identify influence factors for tacit knowledge transfer in higher education institutions, as well as potential methods for the tacit knowledge transfer effectuation. It uses literature review based on critical thinking together with participant observation and exploratory introspection in order to suggest a potential design for the future testing and utilization of the identified factors and methods. The main identified influence factors are: national culture dimensions and professional culture, organizational structures, culture, leadership, and commitment, distributive and procedural justice, transparency, personality traits, cooperativeness, emotional intelligence, interpersonal trust, altruism, attitude towards mistakes. Among these factors we can identify the most frequent barriers, which are physical and professional distance, lack of trust, lack of appreciation for others’ ideas, lack of value for one’s intuition, unawareness of own knowledge, unwillingness to share, lack of retention, lack of motivation. The main possible methods for tacit knowledge transfer for managers in higher education institutions are: observation and reflective practice, formal and informal socialization meetings, storytelling, role rotation, mentoring for managers, training of successors, teams of learning managers, goal-directed interviews at the moment of power transfer, worse practices learning communities, managerial thumb-a-lift.