The Impact of Knowledge Behavioural Factors on Tacit Knowledge Retention: Empirical Study in Oil and Gas Industry

Abstract

Organisation need be more effective in retaining the tacit knowledge (know-how and know-what) and made it accessible for another staff to be more productive and enable management to make better decisions. Relying on explicit knowledge and old-style training courses is simply no longer effective to transfer or retain knowledge; therefore, understanding the role of tacit knowledge retentions as part of knowledge management is becoming increasingly more important to fulfil the organisation strategic goals. To attain the aim, theoretical and empirical study using (275) samples from different international oil and gas companies have quantitatively assessed three main factors; the strategic impact of tacit knowledge loss, the impact of knowledge and organisational behaviour at the individual level on knowledge retention within the organization. Based on the study results, both knowledge and organisational behaviour shows direct impact in knowledge retention enhancement. What knowledge and whose knowledge should be emphasised to reduce the impact of crew change. Knowledge management implementation to be the most important factor as Learning and sharing knowledge is affected by the cognitive processes and the way the organisation practice and implement the knowledge share such as mini-workshops, short assignment and community of practice (CoP). The last factor is positive individual attitude, which reflected in more effectiveness knowledge share and transfer. These factors improve tacit knowledge retention and fulfil the strategic goals such as competitiveness advantage and improve the performance, productivity and employee’s effectiveness.
 Keywords: Oil and Gas, Knowledge Retention, Tacit knowledge, knowledge behaviour, organisational behaviour.

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“…Explicit knowledge refers to knowledge that can be codified and articulated, such as manuals, documents and reports. In contrast, tacit knowledge is the knowledge that resides in an individual's brain (Abdullah Gaghman, 2020). Tacit knowledge is difficult to represent textually.…”