Leading Knowledge Sharing in Organizations

Innovational leadership is a set of practices and skills that leaders develop to promote innovative behaviors in their workers at the individual and collective levels. This concept is novel and focuses on one role of leaders: the facilitation of generating new or significantly improved products and services. Innovational leadership encourages individual innovation and innovative behaviors in their employees. Innovative behavior is the intentional actions of workers oriented toward generating, applying, and implementing new ideas, products, and processes. This type of leadership focuses on workers´ innovative outcomes. Previous studies with other leadership styles have shown that transformational leadership encourages a climate for innovative work behaviors, while transactional leadership influences exploitative innovation activities. Knowledge sharing is the exchange of knowledge among individuals. In an organizational context, knowledge sharing is the foundation for generating innovations. Knowledge sharing is a fundamental process that helps employees contribute their skills and experience to creative and organizational value dynamics. Knowledge sharing involves the transfer of experience and expertise to facilitate business development and accomplishing organizational objectives. Self-efficacy is an individual´s confidence in their abilities to execute a particular task. It influences learning and performance. This research studied whether innovational leadership influences two types of knowledge sharing: tacit and explicit. At the same time, the role of self-efficacy as a mediator variable was evaluated. The sample consisted of 415 workers from different sectors in Colombia. According to the results, innovational leadership positively influenced tacit and explicit knowledge, although the effect on tacit knowledge was higher than on explicit. Self-efficacy was a mediator in the relationship between innovational leadership and knowledge sharing. No moderator effect of sex was found between innovational leadership and knowledge sharing. Additional research is suggested to explore the differences between innovational leadership and other types of leadership in sharing tacit and explicit knowledge. At the same time, complementary investigations about the dynamics of innovational leadership are needed to understand why it affects more tacit knowledge than explicit knowledge.