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How leadership enhances employees’ knowledge sharing: the intervening roles of relational and organizational identification

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Abstract

Knowledge exchange among employees is crucial to organizational effectiveness. Leadership can enhance or detract from employees’ willingness to share knowledge. This study examines how leadership affects knowledge sharing in a knowledge-intensive work setting. It proposes and tests a model which posits that (1) transformational leadership affects the extent to which employees identify with their manager; (2) this relational identification, mediated by the quality of LMX (Leader-Member Exchange), leads to greater identification with the organization and its goals, which in turn results in greater knowledge sharing. The sample consisted of two hundred and three R&D employees engaged in advanced technological projects. Path analysis results indicated that there are both direct and indirect (through LMX) relationships between transformational leadership and relational identification: relational identification promotes organizational identification which, in turn, is positively related to knowledge sharing. These results highlight the importance of transformational leadership and LMX for promoting relational and organizational identification, thereby facilitating employee knowledge sharing.

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Acknowledgments

We wish to thank the Editor and two anonymous reviewers of this journal for their helpful comments and suggestion. We also thank Esther Singer for her editorial comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. How Leadership Enhances Employees’ Knowledge Sharing: The Intervening Roles of Relational and Organizational Identification

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Graduate School of Business Administration, Bar-Ilan University, 52900, Ramat Gan, Israel

    Abraham Carmeli & Avi Levi

  2. C.T. Bauer College of Business, Management Department, University of Houston, 334 Melcher Hall, Houston, TX, 77204-6021, USA

    Leanne Atwater

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  1. Abraham Carmeli
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Correspondence to Abraham Carmeli.

Appendix A: measurement items

Appendix A: measurement items

Items measuring Organizational Identification (source: Mael and Ashforth’s 1992 scale):

  • When someone criticizes my organization, it feels like a personal insult

  • I am very interested in what others think about my organization

  • When I talk about this organization, I usually say ‘we’ rather than ‘they’

  • This organization’s successes are my successes

  • When someone praises this organization it feels like a personal compliment

  • If a story in the media criticized this organization, I would feel embarrassed

Items measuring Relational Identification (Source: An adaptation of Mael and Ashforth’s 1992 scale):

  • When someone criticizes my manager, it feels like a personal insult

  • I am very interested in what others think about my manager

  • When I talk about my manager, I usually say ‘we’ rather than ‘he’ or ‘she’

  • My manager’s successes are my successes

  • When someone praises my manager it feels like a personal compliment

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Carmeli, A., Atwater, L. & Levi, A. How leadership enhances employees’ knowledge sharing: the intervening roles of relational and organizational identification. J Technol Transf 36, 257–274 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-010-9154-y

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