Besong, D: Tacit Knowledge

Whether in decision making or implementation knowledge has continuously been a valuable commodity to organizational success. The learning process remains particularly important to the quality of knowledge achieved. There exist enormous material on knowledge, types of knowledge and how organizations learn, for example, substantial academic literature already exists in the area of explicit and tacit knowledge. Also a handful of research has elaborated on the individual and group learning cycles of organizations. However, academic research as at now has fallen short in that none has tried to capture the role played by tacit knowledge in the learning cycles. To capture and emphasise this role, this work looks at the characteristics of tacit knowledge, the phases of the learning cycle and how tacit knowledge encourages learning through its characteristics. The research is based on theoretical review from literature and interviews made with a personal learner and two experts in organizational learning. This work remains valuable to and serves to meet the going needs of learning organizations, decision makers, universities and the teaching staff and most especially the research world.