Study On Incentives Portfolio For Tacit Knowledge Management In High-tech Companies

The twenty-first century is the century of Knowledge Economy, in which knowledge has gradually become the main source of competitive advantage. Whoever masters the knowledge, will gain the core resources of business development, and obtain a lasting competitive advantage in the market as a result. Knowledge with strategic values to a company mainly exists in the form of tacit knowledge, which, therefore, has become the top factor of production to the company.In a high-tech company, tacit knowledge is mainly kept by knowledge workers. It is whether the management of the company can effectively motivate knowledge workers to be proactive in the sharing and investment of tacit knowledge that is the key to the capability of innovation. Therefore, this dissertation studies on knowledge workers and tacit knowledge, aiming at Study on Incentive Portfolio for Tacit Knowledge Management in High-tech Companies.At first this dissertation summarily studies on the concept, characteristics and major incentives of knowledge workers. On this basis, two principal-agent models is established to work out how knowledge workers share tacit knowledge and invest in it. Following is the incentive portfolio, exemplified by the case of Microsoft. As follow are the conclusions.Tacit knowledge is divided into four types by two dimensions, whether its existence can be realized subjectively and the possibility to be expressed objectively. That is surface tacit knowledge, tacit knowledge needing extraction, tacit knowledge needing excavation and deep tacit knowledge. The first type can be shared by motivating knowledge workers, as while the latter three types can be made to be significant through continuous investment and learning behavior.The effort of tacit knowledge is influenced by the evaluation of the ability of knowledge workers from their company, the costs of sharing tacit knowledge and earning expectations to the company. Performance incentives focus on short-term motivation, while property rights focus on the long-term one. Both incentives have a negative correlation, which requires the management to trade off.Incentive portfolio for tacit knowledge management in high-tech companies is a combination of explicit and tacit incentives. Explicit incentives include performance incentives and property rights, meanwhile tacit ones are composed of achievement incentives, personal growth incentives and organizational environment incentives.