Determining the Critical Factors of Tacit Knowledge in Service Industry in Turkey

Tacit knowledge is considered as a strategic factor in knowledge management implementation. Accordingly, it attracts significant attention both from researchers and academicians. Managing tacit knowledge effectively and efficiently is becoming a key success factor for organizations. To gain competitive advantage by using tacit knowledge, tacit knowledge should be understood well. Determining critical factors of tacit knowledge is expected to be helpful. The critical factors of tacit knowledge are one of the challenging issues in knowledge management. This paper aims to analyze critical factors of tacit knowledge based survey data. The survey of this study is conducted on composed of 30 companies from different sectors within service industry in Turkey. The obtained data from the surveys is analyzed through the SPSS statistical packaged software. Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) show that tacit knowledge was divided into four factors, namely individual/personal knowledge, managerial knowledge, expertise knowledge, and collective knowledge.