Tacit Knowledge and Employee Competency in Malaysian Service-Based Industries: A Preliminary Study

Managing employee knowledge has become an important HR activity in organizations today. Knowledge is viewed as an organization’s intellectual property and the literature delineates knowledge into two broad categories i.e. explicit and tacit knowledge (TK). Knowledge which draws on the accumulated experience and learning of a person and which is hard to reproduce or share with others is called TK thus suggested that knowledge is mainly tacit and rests in people’s heads. TK is not easily communicated or quantified, gained through experience and communicated on an informal basis, created through a continuous dialogue between tacit and explicit knowledge.Within a learning organisation (LO) the identification and work on TK is a key to organizational success and a source of competitive advantage. Therefore this study was conducted to gauge the relationship between TK of senior coworkers and competencies of junior co-workers. TK sharing in services-based industry is explored due to the fact that it plays a pivotal role and contributes significantly towards national development. A quantitative approach was deployed with selfadministered questionnaires to collect the data. Both descriptive and inferential analysis using SPSS were carried out to test the research objectives. Results of the study indicate that TK owned by senior coworkers has a significant relationship with competencies of junior co-workers. Thus disregarding TK is a critical weakness within an organization. It is hoped that this preliminary study will be able to enrich the existing literature in the vast field of knowledge management.