The role of explicit and implicit knowledge in work performance

Why do experts tend to outperform everyone else? One possibility is that the advantage comes down to the specific character of what they know, both the knowledge they can state outright and the knowledge they carry without being able to articulate it. This study, by Britta Herbig and André Büssing, sets out to test that idea directly.

Pulling together what earlier research says about explicit and implicit knowledge produces a messy picture. Different theoretical traditions describe these two forms of knowing in ways that often conflict, and the available methods have a built-in limitation: they rarely let you place explicit and implicit knowledge side by side within one actual professional setting. So a fresh method was needed, one that could bring both types onto comparable ground.

The participants were fifteen nurses. Each sat for an interview that probed their explicit professional knowledge, the kind they could put into words. Separately, each had to respond within a demanding, high-stakes nursing situation, and the implicit knowledge steering those actions was drawn out and made visible. From there the nurses were sorted into two groups based on how well they had performed, the successful and the unsuccessful.

To compare the results from the knowledge test against the method that surfaced implicit knowledge, the researchers turned to Formal Concept Analysis, examining both what the knowledge contained and how it was organized across the two performance groups.

The contrasts that turned up were telling. Weaker performers carried noticeably more emotional material in their explicit knowledge than the stronger ones. The stronger performers, for their part, held implicit knowledge that was more flexible than what the weaker group showed.

Herbig and Büssing close by weighing what these findings mean for method, for how such studies might be designed, and for the practical side of knowledge management.