Introduction

KNOWLEDGE IS A critical ingredient people apply daily in their transactions whether in an organization or the society. When it is transferred, it provides a means of maintaining values and legacies in the society whether in families, governments, monarchies, organization or the society in general. Specifically, in an organization, knowledge determines the competitive advantage of the organization, which makes its transfer a critical success factor if the organization intends to survive in a dynamic market condition. It also provides the means to structure the resources of an organization. This suggests that if an organization does not have a means to transfer its core competence from the knowledgeable employees to others, more especially from a departing leader to an incoming leader, the tendencies for the organization to lose its comparative advantage or longevity will be likely. In concurrence, Rothwell (2010a) noted that an organization that is without an efficacious scheme for knowledge transfer amongst its employees stands the risk of liquidation and extinction when sudden disaster affects its human resources. Obviously, understanding the factors that influence knowledge transfer amongst the members of an organization would also enhance the organizational competitive advantage and its business longevity. Put differently, knowledge retention is indeed crucial to an organization as it is to the society, more especially, during a leadership succession process, where a predecessor is required to pass his or her legacies to a successor. In situations where legacies are not passed on from one leader to another, the organization stands the risk of losing its core competences and that may lead to loss of the organizational memory. Correspondingly, in our contemporary society when parents do not pass on their core values and legacies to the succeeding generation, it leads to generational memory loss. Generally, when these legacies are not passed on, it becomes a memory loss to the organization or the society because the legacies reside in the heads of the people whether in an organization or the society. From the reasoning above, it is evident that when employees leave an organization without transferring part of their core competence, the organizational memory becomes less of its original state since the organizational memory is the total sum of all the memories of the employee in the organization. Similarly, in the society, where parents do not pass their legacies or life experiences to their children, this causes a generational memory loss because the children would not leverage on their parents' legacies. In other words, without legacies transfer, it becomes challenging for an entity to have longevity while remaining relevant in the society.

Knowledge Transfer Practices and the Dynamics of the Environment

The transfer of skills and experiences (tacit knowledge) from one organizational leader (predecessor) to another (successor) is not only challenging to both the predecessor and the successor, but also for those planning the knowledge transfer initiatives. The phrase "from one leader to another" suggests that the skills and experiences are neither a documented knowledge nor a knowledge that may be transferred through training by an external source or any other person within the organization. As if the challenge of transferring knowledge from one leader to another is not enough, the factors in the business environment are also volatile, for example, to enhance the flow of knowledge from one leader to another during leadership succession, during training for researchers and practitioners, performance review, creation of talent pool, job rotation, and so on, as an effective means of supporting the organizational memory (Brull, 2007: Kleinsorge, 2010; Thakkar, 2012). Nevertheless, these leadership succession practices are rather succession processes and do not enhance effective knowledge transfer from a departing leader to an incoming leader during leadership succession. It is even more obvious, when the knowledge transfer involves the transfer of skills and experiences from a departing leader to the incoming leader. In fact, the design of these protocols does not consider the knowledge (skills and experiences) of the predecessor as key to what is to be transferred to the successor. The continued application of these ineffective knowledge transfer protocol in leadership succession is associated with colossal loss of organizational memory. This is evident in the suggestion of Lamourex, Campbell, and Smith (2009) that executives take away 80% of the knowledge they have acquired in the organization. What do these statistics suggest? It means that despite the thousands of dollars spent on developing employees, organizational leaders have not been able to device a scheme to motivate the employees to share their skills and experiences with other employees while they are still in the organization. Furthermore, the statistics also suggest that because of the ineffectiveness of the knowledge transfer schemes, organizational leaders, at the point of exit will most likely transfer only 20% of the expertise to their successors while the predecessors exit the organization with 80% of expertise acquired while in the organization. What a colossal loss to the organization! This proposes that most of the leadership succession practices do not necessarily yield the required knowledge retention. Rather, it is often about replacing one leader with another leader and not necessarily replacing the talent. In concurrence, Dean and Carol (2006) observed that many organizations that have adopted leadership succession practices still suffer from poor leadership because they lack an effective knowledge transfer process for the succession. To quantize the magnitude of the leadership deficiency, Cheese, Thomas, and Craig (2008) observed that the 24% to 74% leadership deficiency in organizations is due to the lack of effective knowledge transfer...