O Conhecimento tácito é inato?

Are you born with tacit knowledge? Of course not. Then where does it come from? Experience. In a study of fifty-four business managers, fifty-one business-school students, and twenty-two undergraduates, we found, as you would predict, that tacit knowledge for management increases, on the average, with business experience. No surprise there. But IQ does not increase.

So tacit knowledge is like other aspects of practical intelligence in that it increases over the course of the life span, in contrast to academic intelligence, which decreases. It is important to keep one additional finding in mind, however. People with more business experience did not score uniformly higher than those with less such experience. In fact, some people with many years of business experience performed quite poorly. The point here is that what matters most is not how much experience you have had but rather how much you have profited from it-in other words, how well you apply what you have learned.

In a later study, which focused on the development of tacit knowledge over the managerial career, we used extensive interviews and observations to construct measures of tacit knowledge for different levels of management. We administered this measure to all executives in four high-technology manufacturing companies. We also obtained nominations from managers' superiors for "outstanding" and "underperforming" managers at the lower, middle, and upper levels.

This approach enabled us to delineate the specific contents of tacit knowledge for each level of management (lower, middle, upper) by examining what experts at each level knew that their poorly performing colleagues did not. Our results showed that there was indeed specialized tacit knowledge for each of the three management levels and that this knowledge is differentially related to success. We derived these results by comparing outstanding and underperforming managers within each management level on inventories specific for the various levels of management. For example, within the domain of knowledge about oneself, knowing how to seek out, create, and enjoy challenges is substantially more important to upper-level executives than to middle-or lower-level executives.

Knowledge about maintaining appropriate levels of control becomes progressively more significant at higher levels of management. Knowledge about self-motivation, self direction, self-awareness, and personal organization is roughly comparable in importance at the lower and middle levels, and becomes somewhat more important at the upper level.

Finally, knowledge about completing tasks and working effectively within the business. environment is substantially more important at high levels. In general, the lower the level of management, the more important it is to know how to get day-to-day, operational tasks accomplished, whereas the higher the level of management, the more important it is to know how to set a vision for the company to follow.

Robert J. Sternberg. Successful Intelligence. New York: A Plume Book, 1997.