5.3 Center for creative leadership study

Further research on what later was formalized as the Tacit Knowledge Inventory for Managers (TKIM; Wagner and Sternberg, 1991) was conducted with a sample of 45 business executives who were participants in a Leadership Development Program (LPD) at the Center for Creative Leadership (Wagner and Sternberg, 1990). The purpose of the study was to validate the test against a managerial simulation and assess its discriminant validity with a variety of psychological measures. Wagner and Sternberg (1990) administered the TKIM with 9 work-related scenarios, each with 10 response options. Participants also completed, as part of the program, the Shipley Institute for Living Scale, a cognition test; the California Psychological Inventory, a self-report personality inventory; the Fundamental Interpersonal Relations Orientation-Behavior (FIRO-B), a measure of desired ways of relating to others; the Hidden Figures Test, a measure of field independence; the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator, a measure of cognitive style; the Kirton Adaptation Innovation Inventory, a measure of preference for innovation; and the Managerial Job Satisfaction Questionnaire. The participants' behavior was also assessed on two managerial simulations.

Beginning with zero-order correlations, the best predictors of managerial performance on the simulation were tacit knowledge (r = -.61, p < .001) and overall cognitive ability (r = .38, p < .001). (The negative correlation for tacit knowledge reflects the deviation scoring system used, in which better performance corresponds to less deviation from the expert prototype and thus to lower scores.) The correlation between tacit knowledge and overall cognitive ability was not significant (r = -.14, p > .05).

Hierarchical regression analyses were performed to examine the unique predictive value of tacit knowledge when used in conjunction with the various other cognition and personality tests. For each hierarchical regression analysis, the unique prediction of the TKIM was represented by the change in R² from a restricted model to a full model. In each case, the restricted model contained a subset of all the measures, and the full model was created by adding the TKIM to the equation. A significant change in R² indicated that the predictive relation between tacit knowledge and the simulation performance was not accounted for by the set of predictors in the restricted model.

In every case, tacit knowledge accounted for a significant increases in variance. In addition, when tacit knowledge, IQ, and selected subtests from the personality inventories were combined as predictors, nearly all of the reliable variance in the criterion was accounted for. These results support the strategy of enhancing validity and utility by supplementing existing selection procedures with additional ones. They also suggest that the construct of tacit knowledge cannot readily be subsumed by the existing constructs of cognitive skill and personality represented by the other measures used in the study.