›› 2015, Vol. 27 ›› Issue (9): 130-139.

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Influence of Authoritarian and Empowering Leadership on Employee's Tacit Knowledge Sharing

Zhang Yajun1,2, Zhang Jinlong1, Zhang Qianfan1, Zhang Junwei3   

  1. 1. School of Management, Huazhong University of Science and Technology, Wuhan 430074;
    2. School of Business Administration, Guizhou University of Finance and Economics, Guiyang 550025;
    3. School of Economics and Management, Huazhong Agricultural University, Wuhan 430070
  • Received:2014-09-02 Online:2015-09-30 Published:2015-09-29

Abstract:

This paper aims to investigate the influence mechanism of authoritarian leadership and empowering leadership on employee's tacit knowledge sharing, focusing on the mediating effect of leader-member exchange and the moderating effect of employee traditionality. We select an enterprise's employees and their direct supervisor as research subjects and analyze the 286 sets of paired data through structural equation model, hierarchical regression and so forth. The results indicate that authoritarian leadership has a significantly negative effect on tacit knowledge sharing while empowering leadership has remarkable positive influence on tacit knowledge sharing; leader-member exchange plays a totally mediating role in the relationships between authoritarian leadership and empowering leadership and tacit knowledge sharing; employee traditionality positively moderates the relationships between authoritarian leadership and empowering leadership and tacit knowledge sharing, that is, the negative relationship between authoritarian leadership and tacit knowledge sharing and the positive relationship between empowering leadership and tacit knowledge sharing would be weaker when employees have higher traditionality.

Key words: authoritarian leadership, empowering leadership, leader-member exchange, employee traditionality, tacit knowledge sharing