The findings demonstrate that tacit knowledge is strongly and positively correlated to sales team performance. According to the Resource Based View of the firm, knowledge should be treated as an asset, just as you would treat a tangible asset. Therefore, since tacit knowledge is an asset and correlated with sales team performance, managers need to use knowledge of this correlation to more effectively manage their sales teams.
Knowing this, sales managers could use the TKI as a tool to allocate talent, build stronger sales teams, assign accounts, and evaluate performance. At the sales team level, a sales manager could use the TKI to better quantify the sales team‘s endowment of tacit knowledge. With a better understanding of a sales team‘s tacit knowledge a sales manager could identify problems
with a sales team‘s performance earlier in the sales cycle. A sales manager could use the TKI to build a sales team that specializes in a certain function, account, or vertical market. A sales manager could facilitate collaboration between sales team‘s more effectively using the TKI.
At the individual account manager level, the TKI could complement commonly used personality assessments to create a more in depth capabilities assessment of an account manager. Understanding the composition of an account manager‘s knowledge will allow a sales manager
to better relate to an account manager and provide more effective feedback. A sales manager could also use the TKI to identify deficiencies earlier in an account manager‘s career which could aid in increasing tenure and augmenting career development of newly hired account managers. A sales manager might create a mentor/mentee relationship between Account Manager ―A‖ and Account Manager ―B‖ if ―A‖ had a high level of product knowledge but
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Without a tool to identify ―A‘s‖ tacit product and customer relationship knowledge levels the
sales manager is relying on intuition.
Correlational research is inherently limited since it cannot prove causation. Kachigan (1986) argued that, when there is correlation between two constructs, it provides three pieces of information. First, correlation exhibits a descriptive function, describing the construct in reality. Second, correlation exhibits a predictive function, by allowing the indirect measurement of construct by proxy to predict the behaviour of a second correlated construct. Third, assists in the examination of the relationship of the variance of one variable to the variance of a second correlated variable.Kachigan further cautions, that correlation, ―…does not imply causality‖ (Kachigan, 1986: 213). However, there appears to be a correlation between tacit knowledge owned by sales teams and sales team performance. Whether tacit knowledge is causal with regard to sales performance to the exclusion of all other factors is difficult, if not impossible, to discern. It is possible that a third determinant or confluence of many determinants is causal to sales team performance.
A research model demonstrating the subtle interactions and abstractions of psychological, interpersonal, and cultural factors would most likely yield more predictive results. Also,
performing objective testing, rather than relying on self-reported values, for actual explicit product knowledge would be helpful in fine tuning the TKI. In this study, product knowledge was self-reported and was not significantly correlated to selling level. However, high product knowledge would more likely be relevant when used with relationship knowledge. Refining the survey to objectively represent an individual‘s product knowledge could improve the precision of the TKI.
62 Limitations
The scope of the data spans a period of one year. Analyzing only one year‘s data makes it difficult to determine the long term performance of sales teams. A longer period of study is needed to rule out abnormal fluctuations in performance due to unusually large one-time orders, structural changes in territory, and changes in the number or composition of accounts managed by a team.
Another limitation is the sample size surveyed. The population of the sample group is small, only eighteen salespeople. Therefore, to better represent aspects of the larger organization the survey should involve a greater number of participants. While the sample statistically
represents the majority of salespeople within the organization, a larger sample size would yield more reliable and valid results.
Finally, the problem of measuring knowledge assets through a self-reported survey instrument is inherent in the research performed. Since the survey instrument measures the salesperson‘s perception of their stock of tacit knowledge, it is vulnerable to self-serving bias.
Self-serving bias is the tendency of a person to accept responsibility for desirable outcomes and externalize undesirable outcomes (Shepperd, Malone & Sweeny, 2008). According to Stephan & Rosenfield (1976), one of the motivations of self-serving bias is known as self-enhancement which is defined as a person‘s motivation to sustain or enhance one‘s sense of self-worth (Cited
by: Shepperd, Malone & Sweeny, 2008). Participants in our survey could have altered their responses either intentionally or otherwise to defend or enhance their perception of themselves and their own self-worth.
63 Future research
Although preliminary in nature, and exhibiting the expressed limitations, this research indicates areas for further research.Having established a positively correlated relationship between tacit knowledge and sales team performance this research lays the groundwork for academics interested in the interaction between tacit knowledge, knowledge management, sales management, organizational culture, and other variables. Most importantly, this research opens the door to future research with regard to our ability to support managerial decisions and techniques with academic knowledge management concepts and empirical rigor. Further, this research provides an interesting view of sales team management from the perspective of the sales team as a collective knowledge asset. In addition, future research could create a new vein of analysis with regard to the cultural/KM aspects of sales team dynamics and develop methods to assign an empirical measure to the competitive advantage relationships offer.
While the use of a proxy as a research tool is well documented, the main contribution of this research is the development of a Tacit Knowledge Index to indirectly measure a sales
organization‘s tacit knowledge assets. Examples of empirical research of tacit knowledge are few since the idea of measuring tacit knowledge is a relatively new concept. Rigorous investigation into the validity of the construct itself is warranted. Refinement of the TKI using more
sophisticated elicitation techniques; such as, interviews, knowledge audits, concept mapping, cognitive modelling, data analysis and work patterns analysis among others would be interesting future study.
Other questions for future study are: Whether a unified theory of knowledge management is attainable? Whether tacit knowledge can be broken down to codifiable and non-codifiable
64
components? Whether the codification argument could lead to the ―synthesis‖ Nonaka and
Takeuchi allude to when they describe the disparity between Western Cartesian Duality and Eastern Oneness? What is the relationship between individual psychological and personality traits, organizational culture, and team performance? For example, how do individual‘s
perceived power, trustworthiness, humility, confidence, pride, and arrogance relate to team performance?
Creating new, more practical, techniques to better manage and apply tacit knowledge among teams is of particular and immediate value. This work can be used as a template to survey a larger sample and populate a repository of tacit knowledge data to aid researchers in the
65
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