A Study On Relationship Between Leader Style And The Knowledge Staff Performance: The Role Of Psychological Empowerment

In the21stcentury, knowledge workers, as the key role to control manage and use otherresources within the company, become the enterprise’s most valuable resource. How to managethem effectively becomes an important issue of human resources development and management.Effective leadership of knowledge workers is the key to manage knowledge workers successfully,but also an important condition to improve the performance level.Compared with the general staff, the knowledge workers are often engaged in creative work,and the work process is often appear in some thoughts, ideas, inventions, innovation of managementform instead of fixed work steps and processes. This makes them become more independent,creativity etc. Enterprises should fully understand the characteristics of knowledge workers, toimprove their working environment, improve the overall performance level, so that enterprises havea good competitive advantage.Currently, study on the effects of leadership style and job performance in domestic and abroadrelated research is mainly concentrated in the transformational leadership style. The researchincludes transformational leadership and transactional leadership are still relatively small, especiallyfor this unique group of knowledge workers. In this paper, according to the characteristics ofknowledge workers, we analysis their leadership requirements by the methods of empirical researchand explore the style or leadership having a positive impact on knowledge workers’ performance. Italso explores the mediating role of psychological empowerment in leadership style and knowledgeworkers’ job performance. Secondly, this study adopts the method of both questionnaireinvestigation and statistical analysis of combining research, verifying the design assumptions. Themain conclusions are as follows:(1) Transformational leadership style has four dimensions: characteristics of the charm,encouraging excitation, intellectual excitation and personalized care; Transactional leadership stylehas three dimensions: exchange of rewards, exceptional positive management, and exceptionalnegative management; Psychological empowerment has four dimensions: namely meaning, selfefficacy, self-determination and impact; Staff task performance has two dimensions: Taskperformance and contextual performance.(2) Transformational leadership style was significantly correlated with knowledge workers’ jobperformance. Exceptional positive management and exchange of rewards have a significantlypositive correlation with job performance and psychological empowerment. Exceptional negativemanagement have a significantly correlation with job performance and psychologicalempowerment. (3) The knowledge workers who work longer or is at the higher position, will perceivepsychological empowerment easier.(4) Psychological empowerment plays as a mediator between leadership style and knowledgeworkers’ job performance.