Understand Transformational Leadership-Public Team Innovation Link Via Team Learning,Knowledge Sharing,and Absorptive Capacity

Various political,scientific,and industrial revolutions clearly demonstrate that there is a possibility that human innovation can be used to achieve outwitting goals of social justice,welfare,economic growth,urbanization,and cultural development.The public sector requires developing knowledge about what has created successful innovations,understanding the mechanisms of change and their contributing factors,while understanding the special challenges facing the public sector.Unfortunately,in the public management literature,mainstream leadership styles receive little focus,including transformational leadership,which has motivational characteristics and help promote creative behaviors among followers.However,there is a paucity of literature to address the impact of transformational leadership on the collective innovation of employees,especially in small-sized public organizations.Therefore,the current study is different from other studies because it attempts to address this knowledge gap by investigating the impact of transformational leadership on the innovation of public team members by using mediating variables,namely public team learning,team knowledge sharing and absorptive capacity.Moreover,this study also introduces information technology adoption as a moderator in the relationship between mediating variables and the outcome variable(public team innovation).By recognizing the importance and universality of the use of information technology,social media activities,in particular,have been recognized by public authorities around the world and the use of information technology for professional purposes has been encouraged.This study is different from previous studies because it determines the relationship between transformational leadership and public team innovation by applying a moderated mediation model.Under the moderated mediation model,the data were collected from 407 employees and managers of the municipal committees from eastern and central parts of Pakistan.This study uses two-time waves with a time interval of two months to gather the data.In this study,each municipal committee is considered as one team.The data were collected through a questionnaire designed on a Likert scale and this questionnaire was in the English language.The results of this study indicate that transformational leadership has a positive impact on public team learning,team knowledge sharing,and team absorptive capacity.Similarly,results also show that organizational learning and knowledge sharing mediate the relationship between transformational leadership and public team innovation.Moreover,the results indicate that information technology adoption only influences the mediating effects of knowledge sharing.While the mediating effect of team absorptive capacity was found insignificant.Overall study results support our proposed hypothesis.Furthermore,this dissertation discussed findings,implications,limitations and future research directions.