Capturing tacit knowledge in the construction industry in Saudi Arabia

The purpose of this qualitative method, collective case study design, was to determine if capturing tacit knowledge in Class-I (Saudi Arabian Ministry of Municipal and Rural Affairs, 2009) construction firms in Saudi Arabia improves construction productivity. The underlying themes of the study were to determine the construction project managers’ awareness of the significance of capturing tacit knowledge, and to determine the effectiveness of capturing tacit knowledge in improving construction productivity. Data were collected by conducting interviews with 10 project managers from 10 different Class-I construction firms in Saudi Arabia. The findings revealed that the participants were unfamiliar with the concept of capturing tacit knowledge. Once the participants understood what capturing tacit knowledge entails, they believed the potential change from capturing tacit knowledge to: (a) improve decision-making, problem-solving, and crisis management, (b) improve work execution methods, (c) reduce activity rework, and (d) provide training, especially for field workers. The participants believed that knowledge flows from top-down and very little in reverse. The participants stated that knowledge management systems could improve their respective firms’ competitive advantage by: (a) providing a platform to document lessons learned, (b) improving the strategic decision-making process for selecting competitive mark-ups, and (c) providing tools to aid the procurement and estimating departments. The findings revealed that the benefits of capturing tacit knowledge were intuitively recognized by the project managers but little, if anything, was done to capture and reuse the site-generated knowledge to improve the participants firms’ competitive advantage.