Employee perception on supervisors' transformational leadership style and its relationship with supervisors' support on knowledge sharing in Iran Khodro Corporation

Abstract

Organizations have realized the importance of employee’s knowledge sharing as a key process in . A considerable number of researchers highlighted the various factors of knowledge sharing; one less studied factor among them is that of employee perception on supervisors’ transformational leadership style and its relationship with supervisor’ support on knowledge sharing practices. This study aims to investigate the relationship of transformational leadership dimensions (Idealized Influence, Inspirational Motivation, Intellectual Stimulation and Individualized Consideration) and employee perception on supervisors’ transformational leadership style and its relationship with supervisor’ support on knowledge sharing practices in Iran Khodro Corporation (IKCO). This quantitative study was used as research design for the study. Survey research strives to ascertain generalizable and common affiliations across organizations in order to control and provide precise measurement. Data was collected through a self-administrated 5-point linkert questionnaire. The target population for this study comprised of middle employees of IKCO. A total of 280 employees participated in the study trough simple random sampling. In order to measure knowledge sharing construct 20 items and transformational leadership subscales were measured through a 16 surveyed items. Results of this study indicated a positive relationship among transformational leadership attributes and employee perception on supervisors’ transformational leadership style and its relationship with supervisor’ support on knowledge sharing practices. This is explained by a variance (R² = 0.798, F (4, 178) = 77.832, p < .000) of 64%. Further analysis showed that idealized influence, intellectual stimulation, individualized consideration, and individualized motivation explained almost %2, %1, %2, and %2 of the variance in total employee satisfaction with supervisor’ support on knowledge sharing scores accordingly. The findings of this study recommended that organization require enhancing their employee knowledge sharing, and to do so organizations are required to focus on the transformational leadership that can influence employee knowledge sharing.