Tacit Knowledge Management in Engineering Industries: Systematic Literature Review and Development of a Conceptual Model

Abstract

Knowledge of every organisation is the most important resource, often not fully leveraged by organisations. Moreover, the value of tacit knowledge of an individual is much less understood and not exploited to the desired levels in organisations. It is quite evident when an experienced employee retires from an organisation, he carries away a very valuable chunk of knowledge with him, which is a strategic resource of the organisation. The COVID-19 pandemic and the great resignation times created a sudden loss of experts which troubled many organisations and made the topic of tacit knowledge management very relevant to current times. While PRISMA framework was used for selection of articles among the vast literature using justifiable validation criteria, a combination of bibliometric and narrative methods is used for the process of analysis and summarisation. The relevant papers are obtained using keywords “Tacit knowledge”, “Tacit knowledge management”, “Knowledge sharing”. Overall, 50 relevant and quality papers are picked after systematic filtration and study. The important keywords from these papers are picked and analysed to arrive at six major themes under which all the papers can be categorised. The six themes are tacit knowledge concept evolution, barriers to knowledge sharing, tacit knowledge acquisition process — various methods, role of context in knowledge sharing, enablers for tacit knowledge sharing, and IT for explicit Knowledge capture and reuse. Each of these themes also has sub-themes under which the papers are categorised. The gist of papers under each of these themes/sub-themes is captured in detail, providing key insights under each theme. While literature review papers focus on a certain domain or industry, this work developed a conceptual model using these themes which represents the current literature in tacit knowledge management as a system model, thus making this work complementary to the current body of knowledge. This model is useful in placing any future literature under one of the themes. Future work also can focus on adding additional themes as well as making this model more insightful through continuous improvement. Each of the themes in the model created can be colour coded to represent high and least researched areas, which can be a valuable guide for the future researchers. Future research directions relevant for the current engineering industries are collated from the literature reviewed, detailed under the above themes in chronological order.