The appproaches of managers for expliciting tacit knowledge- sample of Fırat University

Today organizations have been generally evaluated with the quantity of their qualified knowledge and they gain asset as they reflect the tacit knowledge and knowledge management skills into their production process. The new ways, methods and knowledge genetared by people as to how a task is accomplished are named as tacit knowledge; and utmost importance is given it since it requires time, effort and wisdom. Therefore, it is widely believed that tacit knowledge is the most crucial resource of organizations in order to improve their capacity to compete. Furthermore, tacit knowledge represent the personal and organizational history that embodies the memory formed by the knowledge and experience accumulated in time.Understanding the tacit knowledge is vital for developing organizational process in its entirety. That?s why the tacit knowlegde should be taken as a key to ensure continuous development and progress for all organizations. Expliciting and sharing the tacit knowledge are highly important in order to acquire an enduring progress especially at universities which are upper level academic institutions responsible for generation, circulation and efficient use of knowledge. In this respect, tacit knowledge is regarded as a vital source of learning, innovation, improvement and production capacity.Tacit knowledge has an effective role in encouraging cooperation and accomplishing success in all stages of development process of organizations. Therefore, a high level of importance should be attached to the efforts dedicated to expliciting and sharing the tacit knowledge among the staff of organizations. Although sharing the tacit knowledge is difficult by its nature, especially social activities such as face to face interactions make it easier to share. Likewise, practical experiences, senior-apprentice interactions, observation, sharing success stories, building regular formal-informal meetings and promoting organizational harmony, setting quality circles are some other activities having major role on expliciting the tacit knowledge.Moreover, in organizations certain types of policies such as developing organizational culture, technical infrustracture easing knowledge sharing, constituting facilitative organizational procedures, adopting a style of management based on social interactions, can be adopted to encaurage sharing of the tacit knowledge.The pupose of this study is, with referance to literature review, to determine the importance and the factors affecting the expliciting of tacit knowledge, a crucial source of improvement and competition in the organizations; to identify the views and practises of high level managers who lead the policies at The University of Fırat on expliciting the tacit knowledge; and based on the obtained results, to make some suggestions for developing strategies that will enhance sharing tacit knowledge at the universities. In the frame of that aim, face to face interviews were conducted with 21 high level managers. Interviewees were asked 21 open-ended questions. As a qualitative research, the data were analized through descriptive methods and contents analysis.The results obtained in the research revealed that the managers working at Fırat University attached importance to tacit knowledge. However, it was found that there were no effective and planned award system which would encourage the sharing of knowledge among the personel; and no knowledge mapping and arvhieve system at the faculties. It was also found that the efforts for recording and announcing the best practices, techniques, and methods of the individuals at the University were not enough; and the guidance and sharing of the researches was not so effective.Key Words: Tacit Knowledge, Knowledge Sharing, Knowledge Management, Organizational Culture, Organizational Comunication, Knowledge Sharing İn Univercities.