Does Trust And Cohesion Facilitate Sharing? Research Of The Impact Of Transformational Leadership On Knowledge Sharing

With the heralding of the"Knowledge Economics", business landscape shifts and technological innovation outpace our expectation. More and more attentions, whether from academic research area or field practice are thrown to Knowledge Management, from which company nurtures its competitive advantages. As knowledge sharing plays an important role in organizational learning process as well as knowledge management, knowledge sharing deserves much study. Its mystery remains in many aspects, from the nature of knowledge to the social interaction dynamics. On the other hand, transformational leadership theory has been on the spotlight in recent decades, and it has been proved that transformational leaders exert much positive influence on organizational knowledge acquiring, transferring and transforming. Its functional paths, however, remain as a black box. The relations between transformational leadership and knowledge sharing still calls for further exploration. Based on literature review, this thesis adopts empirical methodology and intends to explore what desirable traits of transformational leaders and how it influences group members'knowledge sharing behavior. Interpersonal trust and group cohesion are introduced as moderators.The main conclusions of this thesis include: (1) transformational leadership improves group knowledge sharing in both direct and indirect ways; (2) interpersonal trust does not directly help knowledge sharing; its two dimensions, namely affective-based trust and cognitive-based trust, however, have contradictary effects. While affective trust moderates transformational leadership and knowledge sharing process, cognitive trsut improve group cohesion which is thought to positively indicate knowledge sharing enhancement (4) sample demographics such as educational levels and seniority also influence knowledge sharing in unique ways. The results indicate that the effects of the transformational leader behaviors on knowledge sharing behaviors have different machenisms. The implications of these findings for future research on transformational leader behaviors, trust, group cohesion as well as knowledge sharing behavior are then discussed.