Tacit Knowledge Transfer within Organisations

Knowledge and management of such knowledge have been studied for some time now as it became clear that a company with an unstructured approach to corporate knowledge management was incapable of competing in this new environment. As such, management of intangible assets, such as knowledge, came to be perceived as an important tool for competition. Based on that, this article aims to identify the pertinent factors for tacit knowledge transfer within a major government-controlled publicly-listed Brazilian oil company, namely Petrobras, by using a quantitative approach based on exploratory factorial analysis. It is concluded that idiosyncratic factors, the knowledge management strategy adopted by the company, and its organisational structure are relevant elements for the success of tacit knowledge transfer within the organisation. Hence, three propositions arising from the results obtained are consolidated and presented in order that they may be tested in a future explanatory study.