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Background
The view that knowledge is a valuable organisational resource has become widely recognised and accepted in the business community. As a consequence, within the last few decades, there has been an increasing interest in the tacit dimension of knowledge, which is perhaps hardest to manage, as it cannot be formally communicated and is often embedded within human beings. Thus, the issue of tacit knowledge has been dealt with within many disciplines and by many authors, yet still considered to be relatively unexplored and not fully understood ([70] Zack, 1999) compared to work on explicit knowledge ([45] Leonard and Sensiper, 1998; [36] Holtshouse, 1998). Nevertheless, tacit knowledge has become more relevant to sustaining business performance than traditional physical capital and considered as a very crucial factor affecting an organisation's ability to remain competitive ([30] Grant, 1996; [61] Spender, 1996; [26] Eisenhardt and Santos, 2000). In this context, there is an emerging importance placed on tacit dimension of knowledge within the construction industry and its organisations to achieve best value due to industry's inherent nature.
The construction industry is considerably more fragmented than many other industries with a much greater concentration of small professional organisations ([13] Carty, 1995; [33] Halpin and Woodhead, 1998). The services offered by these professional organisations are characterised by being highly tacit knowledge intensive in nature ([48] Løwendahl, 2000), with a wide range of professionals involved, working as an inter-disciplinary team in delivering the construction products. in addition, the concept of the knowledge worker ([31] Green et al. , 2004) has long been important within the construction industry, which is considered to be one of the labour intensive sectors of the economy compared to other industries.
Accordingly, this paper aims to highlight the importance and the relevance of tacit dimension of the knowledge in construction organisational performances through a critical and comprehensive literature review and a synthesis. The paper is organised into four broad sections: first section explores the strategic importance of tacit knowledge, to highlight the vital role gained within organisations towards achieving superior performance through competitive advantage. Within the second section, salient features of the construction industry are discussed and finally in sections three and four the importance and the relevance of the role of tacit knowledge in construction are...