How does the Relationship Between the Mistakes Acceptance Component of Learning Culture and Tacit Knowledge-Sharing Drive Organizational Agility? Risk as a Moderator

Abstract

Changes in the business context create the need to adjust organizational knowledge to new contexts to enable the organizational agile responses to secure competitiveness. Tacit knowledge is strongly contextual. This study is based on the assumption that business context determines tacit knowledge creation and acquisition, and thanks to this, the tacit knowledge-sharing processes support agility. Therefore, this study aims to expose that there is a strong link between the tacit knowledge flow across the organization and its ability to respond agilely (timely, accurately, and creatively) to contextual changes. Based on the sample composed of 640 Polish knowledge workers and data analyzed with the structural equation modeling method (SEM), this study delivers empirical evidence that tacit knowledge flow is vital for organizational agility. The obtained results confirmed that tacit knowledge sharing mediates between the mistakes acceptance component of learning culture and agility. It means agility, understood as the ability to respond agilely to contextual changes, requires being charged by new, contextual, tacit knowledge obtained thanks to trial-error actions (learning by doing) achievable thanks to breaking conventions and experimentation. Moreover, risk management skills have been proven to be one of the critical characteristics of agile organizations today.