| Leadership behaviors, knowledge management, and strategic alliances are considered major business topics today.{09}They are considered to be the important factors for business survival in this global competitive market environment. Research related to these topics can be found in professional journals, such as Strategic Management Journal, Harvard Business Review, Organizational Science, Journal of Management, Journal of Marketing, and Academy of Management Journal from the past 20 years to the present. There has been no previous direct empirical evidence to examine the relationships among leaders' transformational and transactional leadership behaviors, knowledge sharing, and organization's marketing effectiveness in the strategic alliance settings. To fill this research gap, this study focused on examining this relationship with an additional emphasis on professional service firms that have been engaged in strategic alliances.; Using a sample of 165 knowledge workers from 41 large-size accounting firms' offices in both Taiwan and the United Sates, a construct of knowledge sharing with four dimensions was developed for the study. The four dimensions are: (1) the strategies of internal organization knowledge sharing, (2) external organization knowledge sharing with strategic alliance organizations, (3) techniques for supplementing internal organization knowledge sharing, and (4) external organization knowledge sharing with customers. The significant findings of this study are: (1) transformational leadership and contingent reward leadership behaviors were positively related to knowledge sharing in the strategic alliance setting, (2) knowledge sharing, except external organization knowledge sharing with strategic alliance organizations was positively related to the organization's marketing effectiveness in the strategic alliance setting, (3) knowledge sharing partially mediated the contributions of transformational, contingent reward, and laissez-faire leadership behaviors to the organization's marketing effectiveness in the strategic alliance setting. Finally, this study discusses implications of these research results for academic researchers and practitioners. Limitations of this study and recommendations for future research are also provided. |
