Innovational Leadership and Knowledge Sharing: The Mediator Role of Self-efficacy

Abstract: Innovational leadership is a set of practices and skills that leaders develop to promote innovative behaviors in their workers at the individual and collective levels. This is a novel concept focused on one role of leaders: the facilitation of the generation of new or significantly improved products and services. Previous studies with other styles of leadership have shown that transformational leadership encourages a climate for innovative work behaviors, while transactional leadership influences exploitative innovation activities. Knowledge sharing involves the transfer of experience and expertise to facilitate business development and the accomplishment of organizational objectives. Self-efficacy is an individual´s confidence in their abilities to execute a particular task. It influences learning and performance. This research studied whether innovational leadership influences two types of knowledge sharing: tacit and explicit. At the same time, the role of self-efficacy as a mediator variable was evaluated. The sample consisted of 415 workers from different sectors in Colombia. According to the results, innovational leadership positively influenced tacit and explicit knowledge, although the effect on tacit knowledge was higher. Finally, self-efficacy played a mediator role in the relationship between innovational leadership and knowledge sharing. Additional research is suggested to explore the differences between innovational leadership and other types of leadership in the process of sharing tacit and explicit knowledge. At the same time, complementary investigations about the dynamics of innovational leadership are needed to understand why it affects more tacit knowledge than explicit knowledge.