Promoting Individual and Organizational Productivity Through Practice Intelligence: The Role of Tacit Knowledge in Personal and Organizational Effectiveness
Abstract
This report on promoting individual and organizational productivity through practical intelligence discusses the authors' tacit-knowledge framework and some of the experiments done to test the framework. The basic idea behind the experiments is that a critical component to success in organizations is tacit knowledge, or what one learns on the job that is not explicitly taught and often, not even verbalized. We have done a series of experiments that show, in a variety of jobs and settings, the importance and nature of tacit knowledge. These experiments examined the role of tacit knowledge in jobs such as management, teaching, and sales, and looked at the importance of tacit knowledge to students. We found that tacit knowledge tends to increase with experience, although it is what one learns from experience rather than the experience itself that is critical. We also found that tacit knowledge is unrelated to traditional measures of intellectual abilities, and that it predicts job performance about twice as well as conventional ability tests. Tacit knowledge is important in a variety of occupations and can be measured in ways that are both reliable and valid. The authors believe this research shows that tacit knowledge is critical to success in organizational settings.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Technical Report
- Publication Date
- May 01, 1991
- Accession Number
- ADA238086
Entities
People
- Richard K. Wagner
- Robert Sternberg
Organizations
- Yale University