International Review of Industrial and Organizational Psychology

260 INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF INDUSTRIAL AND ORGANIZATIONAL PSYCHOLOGY 20032000). Since this problem is not restricted to implicit knowledge it will not beoutlined further.Second, the ability to communicate implicit knowledge. For this area it isespecially important to note that not every experienced person is an expert(e.g., Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Ro¨mer, 1993). If one combines this withresults showing that experts have difficulties in verbalizing their knowledge(see Kirsner & Speelman, 1998) and that the explicit knowledge of experienced‘non-experts’ contains more naive theories (see Herbig, 2001; Herbig& Bu¨ssing, 2002) that in turn can easily be verbalized, the danger thaterroneous or problematic knowledge might be communicated becomesobvious. Moreover, on an organizational level Porac and Howard (1990)showed that the history of an organization may lead to the development ofperception models that simplify cognition and thus promote erroneousknowledge in communication (see Baumard, 1999).Another important problem of knowledge communication with regard toinformation- and communication systems (see knowledge generation) is implicitknowledge acquired and strengthened through concrete experience.Antonelli (1997) says that this technology is limited to the transfer of explicit(codifiable) knowledge; and Bu¨ssing and Herbig (1998) demonstrated for thedomain of nursing care that the implementation of information and communicationsystems leads to a decrease of informal communication (at leastregarding the content of interest; informal communication regarding thesystem itself may even increase, see Aydin & Rice, 1992), which in turnrepresses implicit knowledge. Therefore, the very (computerized) means toensure knowledge communication might in themselves be hazardous to animportant part of organizational knowledge (Johannessen et al., 2001).The last process category of knowledge management is the use of knowledge.This category comprises the transformation of knowledge into decisionsand actions whereby new knowledge can be generated. Here, the flexibility ofimplicit, experiential knowledge as proposed in work psychology (Carus etal., 1992; Martin, 1995) plays an important role. In order to gain this flexibilitythe use of knowledge in many different contexts seems to be necessary.A consequence of this assumption for organizational knowledge managementis that members of the organization should get enough opportunities to usetheir knowledge in different areas and to experience the consequences of theiractions. As implicit knowledge is not always adequate the risk of inadequateaction in a real context can be too high. Therefore, in order to manageimplicit knowledge, in its level of use, methods like the planning of gamesor simulations might be useful, as they allow people to benefit from theexperience gained from the consequences of their use of knowledgewithout possible risks and costs for the organization.To sum up (see Figure 7.3), implicit knowledge not only places highdemands on the knowledge management in organizations but some of thecommon means of knowledge management (like information systems) also