Assessing Tacit Knowledge and Sharing Intention: A Knowledge Internalization Perspective

Because of the scarcity of research on knowledge internalization, a powerful means for acquiring tacit knowledge which is an intellectual asset critical to sustainable competitive advantage of an organization, this study develops a construct of knowledge internalization and examines its nomological validity. We define knowledge internalization as the process in which an individual relies on various cognitive mechanisms to transform his or her declarative knowledge into actionable procedural knowledge. Analyzing data collected from 259 knowledge workers, we found that knowledge internalization is a second-order formative construct comprising organization and structure, mental models, efficiency, automaticity, and metacognition dimensions. The effect of knowledge internalization on intention to share knowledge is fully mediated by expert power and knowledge self-efficacy. The effect of knowledge internalization on expert power is partially mediated by knowledge self-efficacy. This study contributes to the literature by offering an elaborated construct of knowledge internalization and establishing its nomological validity in the knowledge sharing phenomenon. The developed measure of knowledge internalization can be tailored to assess employees' tacit knowledge in organizations. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.