International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology

IMPLICIT KNOWLEDGE AND EXPERIENCE IN WORK AND ORGANIZATIONS 245Closely related concepts to consciousness are awareness and intention inimplicit knowledge. Implicit knowledge is believed to work without intentionand awareness while explicit knowledge cannot be acquired or used withoutconsciousness, awareness, or intent. At least theoretically, there seems to belittle doubt that implicit knowledge may occur when there are no conscious,reflective strategies to learn (Reber, 1989); that is, that the acquisition ofimplicit knowledge can happen incidentally. Empirically, this assumptionis difficult to test since in the research paradigms of implicit learning thestimuli are nearly always at the forefront of a participant’s attention. Only afew investigations have tried to bring about implicit learning under conditionsof minimal attention, like, for example, research into implicit perceptionin which awareness that something should be learned is prevented byattention manipulation (e.g., MacLeod, 1998). Results indicate that for sometypes of tasks a mere exposure effect is sufficient in order to learn relationsbetween stimuli whereas other types of task need a higher degree of attention(e.g., Greenwald, 1992). Therefore, there is no conclusive answer to thequestion about the necessity of awareness for the acquisition and use ofimplicit knowledge.Another important question in cognitive research concerns the complexityof implicit knowledge. For knowledge to be termed complex it has to comprisea great number of elements that have manifold connections amongthem. Undoubtedly, explicit knowledge can be complex in this way (see,e.g., Preussler, 1998), but for implicit knowledge contradictory researchresults have been found. For example, on the one hand, social cognitionresearch shows that people are not able to name proportion rules forhuman faces but react to even the slightest aberration from these complexrules (e.g., Lewicki, 1986). On the other hand, computer simulations of artificialgrammar research imply that participants in this research did not alwayslearn the complex rules but that results can also be explained by the learningof simple letter pairs (e.g., Ericsson & Smith, 1991). These examples show—even for quite simple contexts—the divergence between the results andtherefore the difficulty to give a final evaluation of the complexity of implicitknowledge. At least theoretically, implicit experiential knowledge, asdescribed in the section, ‘Research in developmental and pedagogicalpsychology’, should be more complex than the knowledge investigated incognitive psychology (Mathews, 1997).Flexibility of knowledge means being able not only to transfer knowledgeto different situations and areas but also to be able to combine and linkdifferent parts of knowledge. Both complexity and flexibility are oftenviewed together whereby it is regularly assumed that consciousness andtherefore explicit knowledge is a precondition for flexibility respectively forthe flexible use of knowledge (Browne, 1997). The inverse assumption isthat implicit knowledge itself is not flexible. Holyoak and Spellman (1993)characterize implicit knowledge as a complex structure but at the same time