Providing a framework for the acquisition of experts' tacit knowledge to identify environmental opportunities and threats

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

• naser motahari farimani ¹
• azam modares ²
• niloofar jahanara ³

¹ Associate Professor, Department of Management, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran

² PhD. Student, Department of Management, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran

³ MSc Student, Department of Management, Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences, Ferdowsi University of Mashhad, Mashhad, Iran

https://doi.org/10.22067/tmj.2021.31138.0

Abstract

1- INTRODUCTION
The topic of knowledge management is of the most important ones for today’s companies and organizations. Today's competitive world has forced organizations to work harder to succeed and survive in competition and manage their knowledge more effectively. Tacit knowledge can be considered as a set of experiences, skills, work perspectives, and value and mental systems within the individual that is gained through professional and personal experiences. Examining the external environment and recognizing the factors of this environment to take advantage of opportunities and avoid threats is seriously related to the method of tacit knowledge acquisition. Therefore, the acquisition of tacit knowledge of experts is one of the key needs for gaining a competitive advantage and the organization’s success. In doing so, it is necessary to identify the experts’ mental patterns, ideas, beliefs, and attitudes toward the future.
 
2-THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK
While there is a lot of foreign research on environmental scanning, few domestic studies have been done on internal scanning. in the field of acquisition of experts’ tacit knowledge, have been also conducted very limited domestic studies. Foreign studies have more studied the effect of tacit knowledge acquisition on various dimensions, but not the identification of strategic factors. Therefore, the purpose of the present study is to provide a framework for acquiring the experts’ tacit knowledge to identify organizational opportunities and threats. this study is based on an interpretive approach and used content analysis as the data analysis strategy.
3- METHODOLOGY
After identifying the key categories extracted from the theoretical literature, in-depth interviews were conducted with experts, and based on the opinions expressed by the interviewees; related codes and categories were extracted. In this phase, data were analyzed by interpretive approach, which is a method for mentally interpreting the content of the interview data. in general, based on theoretical foundations and experts’ opinions and by conducting a qualitative content analysis, this study addressed the shortcomings of the current patterns for identifying the external strategic factors i.e., the organizational opportunities and threats. in the first step of the analysis, the initial or open coding was performed. To do so, the data were broken down into smaller units to shape bigger concepts. Then, all the extracted sentences and phrases were compared continuously and similar ones were grouped. After that, the specific concepts mentioned in all the sentences were extracted and assigned a specific code. in this way, the concepts were extracted from the heart of the interviews as the output of the content analysis.
4- RESULTS & DISCUSSION
After introducing the suggested solutions and tools for each defect expressed by the experts, the current study conducted an interpretive analysis on interviews to prevent the occurrence of defects in the proposed framework. in this framework, the proposed solutions and tools were used in three stages: pre-interview, interview, and post-interview. The proposed framework introduces solutions and tools to realize the expert tacit knowledge and identify the external environment at each phase. Therefore, the tacit knowledge of experts can be achieved to identify opportunities and threats by applying the proposed framework.
5- CONCLUSIONS & SUGGESTIONS
The framework proposed in the present study can be considered by organizational planners to provide better scanning of the environment and take advantage of opportunities with proper planning and full awareness of shortcomings in identifying opportunities and avoiding threats. the results indicated that there are some tools and solutions in each step of the proposed framework to eliminate the identified defects. these solutions must be implemented continuously over time as a basis for identifying opportunities and threats in regard to both the environmental monitoring and the acquisition of knowledge from experts. in the authors’ opinion, the proposed framework can be used to increase the quality of environmental scanning. For example, each stage suggests a solution to make the expert’s mind more focused on the future in line with drawing a long-term viewpoint.

Keywords

• Tacit Knowledge
• Environmental Scanning
• Opportunity
• Threat, Interpretive Analysis

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