**7. Conclusions**

Over the years traditional outsourcing has evolved into long-term problem-solving strategic outsourcing focused on changes in business processes, productivity improvements, technology, and innovation. Instead of delegating simple routine tasks aimed at cost– effectiveness, today's outsourcing is concentrated on long-term cooperation between companies, developing it into business partnerships. The specialized skills and knowledge of outsourcing partners that would otherwise be very costly and almost impossible to obtain within a single company can be shared and exploited. Two main problems appear in such partnerships: the tacit dimension of knowledge in each company and the possibility that outsourcing partners will behave opportunistically. For a sustainable outsourcing relationship, these issues must be managed effectively.

The most important element of the strategic outsourcing relationship is knowledge management as both parties must share their knowledge to jointly create and exploit a common knowledge thesaurus. As any knowledge base consists of tacit and explicit knowledge and the explicit knowledge is relatively easy to share, special attention must be paid to tacit knowledge. The main prerequisite for sharing tacit knowledge is to make it clear to the partner what can be done by investing enough time for the internalization of tacit knowledge, taking care of powerlessness, appreciating emotional commitment and deepening personal involvement, ensuring procedural justice in decision making, establishing effective communication and common culture development, cultivating personal contacts despite the distances, and establishing an appropriate rewards system.

Participants involved in outsourcing activities not only learn from each other, but they also need to unlearn obsolete knowledge and skills contained in procedures, routines, and ways of doing business from the pre-outsourcing period. Sharing tacit knowledge is a demanding task, but its unlearning is far more difficult. In the era of ever-increasing globalization and transcontinental outsourcing, the management of knowledge—especially its tacit dimension—is becoming one of the key drivers of competitiveness. To overcome the perpetual elusiveness of tacit knowledge, we presented a conceptual model that could help manage the outsourcing relationships and contribute to the creation of a common knowledge thesaurus for outsourcing partners. In any relationship where information asymmetry exists, opportunistic behavior can arise. Policy makers and strategy developers should pay attention to such a possibility; otherwise, no sustainable relationship can be established among outsourcing partners.

Investigating strategic outsourcing in light of managing tacit knowledge raises many issues that future research should examine, especially in the area of opportunistic behavior in the outsourcing relationship and the creation of appropriate policy measures and strategic moves to prevent such behavior. The unlearning is another field in which appropriate models for immediate use in business practice still have to be developed. There is also a lack of empirical research on tacit knowledge, which could prove a number of findings and theoretical constructions that many authors have already developed.

#### **8. References**

124 New Research on Knowledge Management Models and Methods

depends on forging strong links among the management, system, and process functions that lead the organization to cooperate. The collaborative relationship is closer and broader with more teams working together on a wide range of functions; as a result, the contract is typically longer. Managing an effective strategic outsourcing relationship requires commitment from all included parties. The success of the relationship depends on cooperation among participants, who must share their business information and knowledge; otherwise, cooperation is not possible. In this process bounded rationality, information asymmetry and opportunistic behavior manifest. Viewing cooperation as information sharing implies the possibility of both the moral hazard and adverse selection. As we have already underscored, cooperation needs private information and a requisite minimum of shared, common, public information, making the platform establish cooperation. In the case of cooperative participation, every participant will also make his or her private information available. There is always a possibility that some participants may behave in an opportunistic way and put less private information on the table than others, they may not own it, pretend to be team members, or tend to hide their private information because they

As in strategic outsourcing, the ownership of intangible assets of cooperating companies can be challenging to define; thus, it is important that cooperating parties "contractually specify who will have control over each dimension of each asset in each particular future contingency" (Grossman & Hart, 1986, p. 716). A theory of the firm provides a conceptual background for understanding the strategic outsourcing relationship. A successful relationship requires that the outsourcer and the provider disclose all information to ensure mutual benefits. To make the relationship efficacious, all parties need to exchange all relevant information. A provider is not only a performer of services, but also a partner who

Over the years traditional outsourcing has evolved into long-term problem-solving strategic outsourcing focused on changes in business processes, productivity improvements, technology, and innovation. Instead of delegating simple routine tasks aimed at cost– effectiveness, today's outsourcing is concentrated on long-term cooperation between companies, developing it into business partnerships. The specialized skills and knowledge of outsourcing partners that would otherwise be very costly and almost impossible to obtain within a single company can be shared and exploited. Two main problems appear in such partnerships: the tacit dimension of knowledge in each company and the possibility that outsourcing partners will behave opportunistically. For a sustainable outsourcing

The most important element of the strategic outsourcing relationship is knowledge management as both parties must share their knowledge to jointly create and exploit a common knowledge thesaurus. As any knowledge base consists of tacit and explicit knowledge and the explicit knowledge is relatively easy to share, special attention must be paid to tacit knowledge. The main prerequisite for sharing tacit knowledge is to make it clear to the partner what can be done by investing enough time for the internalization of tacit knowledge, taking care of powerlessness, appreciating emotional commitment and deepening personal involvement, ensuring procedural justice in decision making, establishing effective communication and common culture development, cultivating personal contacts despite the distances, and establishing an appropriate rewards system.

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expect to benefit from it later in the process.

relationship, these issues must be managed effectively.

**7. Conclusions** 


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**7** 

*Spain* 

**Assessment of Operational Experience as** 

In the current economic environment characterized by increasing competition and the pursuit of excellence, companies need to increase the efficiency of their production processes and management. In this sense, the policy of continuous improvement in organizations must be based on knowledge acquisition according to the experience of the company in the development of their activities and learning through the analysis of the operational experience. In recent literature several authors have found evidence of how the communications about observations, experiences and incidents are an important requisite for learning (Edmondson 1996; Van Dyck et al., 2005; Solana and Pérez, 2011). Even incidents without severe consequences also have considerable learning potential

Researchers have recognized the significance of organizational learning and its related concepts like the process of improving actions through better knowledge and understanding (Fiol and Lyles, 1985); the collective ability of a group to continuously expand its capacity to create the future in terms of personal mastery, shared vision, systems thinking, and team learning (Senge, 1990), identifying four necessary components: knowledge acquisition, information distribution, information interpretation and organizational memory (Huber, 1991); a structured and systematic method applied by an organization to motivate employees to learn (Dodgson, 1993). A gradual learning process by which staff learns

The analysis of operating experience in organizations, whether it is a requirement that comes from external bodies, as if it is a policy promoted internally to the organization, is a relevant strategy of acquiring knowledge and learning for companies (Pérez and Solana, 2011). This strategy has proven effective in industries such as nuclear, to maintain a high level of efficiency and contribute to the improvement of processes and activities in such organizations, being able to apply this methodology in other companies and activity sectors. The implementation of organizational learning programs requires that the managerial attention should create opportunities for the work staff to engage in communication about incidents in order to allow for the development of shared knowledge about error incidents. Opportunities for employees to interact and discuss incidents openly may promote

through experiences and cooperate with other colleagues (Marchand et al., 2000).

**1. Introduction** 

(Homsma et al., 2009).

organizational learning (Homsma et al., 2009).

**Strategy for Knowledge Acquisition and** 

**Learning in Organizations** 

*University of Cantabria* 

Pedro Solana González and Daniel Pérez González

