Transformational Leadership and Organizational Change Examining the Mediational Approach of Knowledge Sharing

Introduction

Organizational change is required for survival and prosperity of an organization. The frequent and purposeful changes are smaller but effective in organizational change (Wieck & Quinn, 1999). Therefore, many studies have been conducted in past about change; few of them identified the importance of leadership style, and employee participation in change of organization. Two questions have been addressed in this study, first; the transformational leadership style is more effective than any other leadership style as addressed by Bass, & Avolio, (1994) and Dvir, Eden, Avolio, and Shamir, (2002) but other leadership styles are not part of this study theme, and many spontaneous studies have been conducted and one of them is Zhu et al., (2013) study concludes the direct effect of different leadership styles, particularly transactional leadership behavior on organizational citizenship behavior, job performance, creativity and the work outcomes, but this leadership style was shifted to transformational leadership behavior in recent years (Pillai, 2013). Because in various leadership perspective, this kind of leadership style is not only effective in managerial way for organizational change (Bass & Riggio, 2006) process but also creates the environment of sharing knowledge in group and individual level of the organization (Garcia-Morales, Llorens-Montes, Verdu-Jover, 2008; Li, Shang, Liu, and Xi, 2014) and, second; the employee participation in sharing of knowledge stimulates the organizational change. At different level, the transformational behavior of leadership could be more effective at sharing and creating knowledge, while the transactional behavior of leadership might be more effective in knowledge exploitation at organization (Bryant, 2003). The organizations’ leaders want to bring successful organizational change in the organization, then why some changes succeed or fail in organizations? Some of the factors like trust; communication; direct supervision etc are being studied by Allen, Jimmieson, Bordia, and Irmer, (2007) for successful organizational change.

This study integrates the leadership behavior and knowledge sharing for plausible gaining of change in organization. Therefore, the study builds successful change implementation, as Herold, et al., (2007) examined that employees are critical for thriving change, because of developing better work environment for decisions regarding organizational change. For this purpose, the transformational leadership has been linked effectively with managers in organizational change process (Bass, & Riggio, 2006), which posits the need for creating, sharing and changing organizational visions with employees for adaptation, inspiration and institutionalizing change. However, the transformational leadership; sharing knowledge sharing and organizational change at one level.

This study has been organized in given form. The first part presents the literature on transformational leadership style, knowledge sharing and organizational change. The research model has been developed and articulated four hypotheses correspondingly. Research methodology was developed and clarified the constructs of variables; data collection procedures; data analysis and last the hypotheses testing for the current study.