The Critical Factors Of Tacit Knowledge Sharing Within The Integrated Project Team

Sharing tacit knowledge is of great importance for the integrated project team topursue project success. However, research on the factors affecting tacit knowledgesharing within the integrated project team is insufficient in the constructionmanagement field.This paper mainly focuses on the critical factors of tacit knowledge sharingwithin the integrated project team and explores how these factors affect tacitknowledge sharing. Through significant analysis, we have identified those factors thatare of significant importance to tacit knowledge. Then we use factors analysis togroup the factors into more "manageable" categories. The result demonstrates five"wider factors" that is critical to tacit knowledge sharing. They are "swift trust","information-based trust","identification-based trust","personal benefits" and "lackof self-efficacy". We use path analysis to further explore how these factors correlateto each other and finally affect tacit knowledge sharing within the integrated projectteam. We found personal benefits positively relates to swift trust andinformation-based trust; identification-based trust can reduce self-efficacy which has anegative impact on tacit knowledge sharing. We not only found out the closerelationship between trust and tacit knowledge sharing, but also present a deeperanalysis of what specific form of trust influence tacit knowledge sharing taking trustevolution into account. Swift trust is found to have important impacts oninformation-based trust and identification-based trust which positively relate to tacitknowledge sharing.Our findings can provide important implications for enhance tacit knowledgesharing in the integrated project team. More attention should be paid on swift trust atthe early stage of the integrated project team. Project managers should promoteinformation sharing and social interactions between team members and try to build ano-blaming atmosphere that encourage every team member to actively participate inknowledge sharing.