5.2 Business managers

Wagner and Sternberg (1985) and Wagner (1987) conducted studies with business managers in parallel to the studies with academic psychologists described above. That is, they involved similar methods but with a different performance domain.

Wagner and Sternberg (1985) developed a tacit-knowledge test for business managers based on interviews with 5 experienced and successful mid-level managers. The test consisted of 12 work-related situations with 9 to 20 response options and was administered to 54 managers (19 of whom were from among top 20 Fortune 500 companies), 51 graduate students from 5 business schools varying in prestige, and 22 Yale undergraduates. The criteria obtained for the managers included status in or outside the top Fortune 500 companies, number of years of management experience, number of years of formal schooling, salary, number of employees supervised, and level of job title. Undergraduates completed the DAT Verbal Reasoning subtest.

Responses to the test were scored by correlating ratings on each item with an index variable for group membership (1=undergraduates, 2=business school graduate students, 3=business managers). Wagner and Sternberg found significant correlations between tacit-knowledge and company level (.34), number of years of schooling (.41), and salary (.46). For the undergraduates, the correlation between tacit-knowledge scores and verbal-reasoning skill was not significant (.16), and again indicated that the tacit knowledge test was not a proxy for a traditional general cognition test.

In the second study, Wagner (1987) administered the test to 64 business managers, 25 business graduate students, and 60 Yale undergraduates. The distance scoring method, described above, was used. An expert profile was created from the responses of 13 business executives from Fortune 500 firms. The mean tacit-knowledge scores were 244 for business managers, 340 for business graduate students, and 417 for undergraduates, indicating greater tacit knowledge with experience. Correlations with the criterion measures were lower than those for academic psychologists. However, a significant correlation was obtained between tacit-knowledge scores and the number of years of management experience (-.30). Other correlations were in the predicted direction, but not significant. There was no significant correlation between tacit-knowledge scores and verbal-reasoning scores. And again, the six subscales generally correlated significantly with one another, with values ranging from .2 to .5, indicating a weak general factor for tacit knowledge.

In this study, the undergraduate participants completed the tacit-knowledge tests for both academic psychologists and business managers. The correlation between scores on the two tests was .58 and highly significant. Wagner concluded that not only do the subscales of the tacit-knowledge test correlate within a domain, but tacit-knowledge also appear to correlate across domains.