Strategies for Increasing Knowledge Retention in Universities Through Intergenerational Knowledge Transfer

The new Law of Education promulgated recently in Romania enforces professors retirement at the age of 65. The previous law had a provision for full professors to remain in the academic life up to the age of 70, if their universities needed them. The new legislation produces an earthquake in our universities due to the elimination from the academic life of a very important segment of knowledge and wisdom owners. This dramatic situation shows how important it is to develop strategies for increasing knowledge retention in universities. Since a university is by its own nature a multigenerational workforce, the best strategies should be based on the intergenerational knowledge transfer. The purpose of our paper is to investigate two main strategies for the intergenerational knowledge transfer: a) encouraging cooperation through teamwork, and b) encouraging individual competition. The first strategy is emphasizing the synchronic knowledge transfer, while the second one emphasizes the non-synchronic knowledge transfer. Each of these strategies can be implemented through different mechanisms specific for academic life. We have considered in our research three of them: 1) research grants; 2) writing books, and 3) writing papers for scientific journals. Our investigation is based on the Analytic Hierarchy Process (AHP) method, and on using questionnaires structured according to these strategies mentioned above. We distributed 500 questionnaires to all the faculties of economics and business from the state universities, and we have received 223 valid questionnaires. Based on them we computed using AHP the priority vectors for each strategy and activity considered. Numerical results show the importance of the cooperation strategy in the intergenerational knowledge transfer, for increasing the knowledge retention in the university.