Michael Polanyi’s concept of tacit and explicit knowledge in organizations

Running head: STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
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1STRATEGIC HUMAN RESOURCE MANAGEMENT
Provide examples of organization in today’s world that uses Michael
Polanyi’s concept of tacit and explicit knowledge and explain why this is
important to human resource management.
Tacit knowledge is a knowledge which is difficult to transfer to other persons by
verbalizing it or in written format. This kind of knowledge is automatic, needs little time and
also assists organizations to build decisions and affect the collective behaviour of their
workers. Explicit knowledge or information can be written down or expressed easily for
communication. In an organization, explicit knowledge is codified and gathrered as
databases to be further accessed with high reliability, quality and rapid retrieval systems.
According to Michael Polanyi’s theory it is believed that creative acts like discovery is
influenced by strong personal feelings. He emphasized strongly on dialogue in an open
community. He also extended his model for describing the nature of human knowledge that is
found in myth, religion and art (Arnett & Wittmann, 2014).
In an organization, the basic way for community members for accessing tacit
knowledge is by interrogating questions. A regular face to face meeting can be helpful in case
of co-located community. Whereas multinational businesses need some kind of virtual
meetings to raise questions and receive answers (Chuang, Jackson & Jiang, 2016).
Discussions can also be made with web based or email-based tools that will permit this
facility. These are proved to be popular tools to share knowledge in the communities. An
organization named Buckman Laboratories operates many international communities of
practice, where each has its own question-answer forum. This helps the sales agents who face
customers anywhere in the world and can receive lessons and advices from their co-workers
just through an email (Dzekashu & Walter, 2014). The answers or replies are collated on the
community forum in form of “threaded discussions” and saved later for the community