Knowledge Management In Higher Education: Focusing On Tacit Knowledge Sharing For Research Teams

As a new branch of management and a new kind of applied management tool, knowledge management attracts broadly attentions of the management researchers and practicers including domestic and overseas since it rised.The 21 century and after, more and more residents of the global village enter into service economy and knowledge economy.Some judgments ,such as "knowledge is power", "knowledge is the core to creating fortune "and "knowledge is the core of competition ",take on huge glorious as disputable truth in mankind's politics, economy and society activities;therefore, knowledge management will play more and more important function not only in industry and business enterprise as it did in initial stages, but also in public and the third sections .especially in the knowledge-intensive organistions.The American scholar, Nick Milton etc, thought that the essence of knowledge management is to provide strategies to get the right knowledge to the right people at the right time and in the right format. According the research of Polani, tacit knowledge is the most important knowledge. So, managing tacit knowledge becomes important very much since people recognized its value and functions gradually.At the realm of the tacit knowledge management research, sharing tacit knowledge becomes an important topic. Owing to the characters of the recessiveness, only sense, hard coding, hard speech clearly, the best way to sharing it is people's contact and face-to-face communications.This paper was under the above-mentioned background. The author tried to gain new cognitions by case study both in the theory and practice, and hoped which could guide the activities of the research teams in higher education and the higher education itself.The author identified the content, characteristics and manifestations of the tacit knowledge in higher education research teams according to the existent theory of knowledge management firstly. Then, explained and analyzed the best way to sharing tacit knowledge and builded a new model of the influent factors by the SECI model of Nokana, the learning theory of Bandula and some of the theories in organization behavior. All of these provide a theory basis to the positive research.The case study takes three research teams in Soochow University as an example. By the anlysis we can find there are many tacit knowledge sharing behaviors in research team in higher education day by day, however it also exists many problems which baffle tacit knowledge sharing. These problems include the people' complicated factors, the inside and outside environment variable factors of the research teams and the encouragement mechanism in organizations. Therefore, the most important methods to strengthen tacit knowledge sharing and boost innovation are building encourage mechanism, creating adapt environment and leading person's habits and customs changed intentionally.