Tacit knowledge and the use of tacit knowledge in natural decision-making process: a field study

This research is about tacit knowledge (TK) and the use of TK in the natural decision-making (NDM) process. First, the awareness of the existence of TK (professional ability, professional knowledge and professional experience), what its characteristics and source are, the reasons for its importance, whether all these issues differ according to experience, age, sex and geographical regions, how TK can be expressed as a way of thinking based on professional, and also how it can be evaluated within the scope of knowledge hierarchy (KH) have been investigated. Secondly, how TK is used in the natural decision-making process (under time pressure and high risk, etc.) has been investigated. The questionnaire prepared for the research was attended by 505 veterinarians from 7 geographical regions (40 cities) in Türkiye and semi-structured interviews were conducted with 39 participants in Ankara (Türkiye). There was no statistically significant difference between the views on the awareness of the existence of TK in terms of sex, age and professional experience (p > 0,05); a statistically significant difference was found between the views on the tacit knowledge characteristics regarding the difficulty of verbalising the professional knowledge according to the sex variable (p < 0,05). In the natural decision-making process, TK is used when the imperfect knowledge needs to be completed, when it is necessary to make a decision based on experience, when a monitoring decision is required, and not when the risk is high, but rather when there is time pressure. In the light of the findings, a new knowledge hierarchy including explicit and tacit steps (with the metaphor of knowledge mountain) has been proposed, analysed as reversed knowledge hierarchy, and a new definition of tacit knowledge has been made. In addition, new research proposals for future studies have been presented.