Exploring the strategic impact of service employees' tacit knowledge : the development of an indicator for forecasting economic performance of hotel companies

PhD thesis in International hotel and tourism managementBackground: The concept of knowledge management (KM) and the role of tacit knowledge as a strategic asset for building competitive advantage through KM strategies and activities have become increasingly popular over the last fifteen years - both in management philosophy and in business practice. Despite the increasing acknowledgement of KM and tacit knowledge in many sectors, the application and empirical study of KM in the hospitality sector is however a relatively new phenomenon. Published KM research in the hospitality sector is thus still scarce, and studies currently remain limited, inconclusive, and mostly focused on anecdotal and one-off case studies. In a related vein, there is widespread agreement among scholars in business management that the construct of tacit knowledge is not sufficiently specified and that it resists operationalization. Yet, turning to strategic management, evidence on the operationalization of tacit knowledge does exist. Strategic management scholars for instance agree that tacit knowledge is both an intangible asset and a strategic asset, and that intuitive judgments constitute the vehicle to elicit individual tacit knowledge. Previous studies in the resource-based view (RBV) tradition and knowledge-based view (KBV) tradition in strategic management have likewise offered evidence on the existence of tacit knowledge and intangible assets and their relationship with economic firm performance. Moreover, behavioral economics offer evidence that confidence indices, i.e. indices of consumer sentiment based on consumers’ intuitive judgments about the future, can predict changes in countries’ GDP...