How Ethical Leadership Promotes Knowledge Sharing: A Social Identity Approach

Wei-Li Wu

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.727903

Abstract

The aim of this study is to investigate the associations among ethical leadership, group identification, relational identification, organizational identification, and knowledge sharing. This study conducted a survey in Taiwan to collect the data. The administrative group members of schools were invited to participate in this study. The sample included 510 participants, and the hypotheses were tested by using the path analysis and bootstrapping methods in the Mplus program to examine how ethical leadership influences knowledge sharing, through various means of identification. The results of this study show that ethical leadership has both a direct and indirect effect on knowledge sharing. There are two mediating paths in the ethical leadership-knowledge sharing relationship. Firstly, group identification mediates the relationship between ethical leadership and knowledge sharing. Secondly, ethical leadership has an influence on knowledge sharing by means of increased relational and organizational identification. This is a pioneering article that explores the psychological mechanism between ethical leadership and knowledge sharing, using the social identity approach. This study has shown that the social identity theory (SIT) is a useful and promising perspective for future research studies on ethical leadership-knowledge sharing.

Highlights

In the knowledge economy, knowledge is one of the most important assets and a critical source of competitive advantage
Based on social identity theory (SIT), this study showed how ethical leadership fosters the identification of its followers and enhances their knowledge sharing
The results of this study have shown that ethical leadership is positively related to employee knowledge sharing

Summary

Introduction

Knowledge is one of the most important assets and a critical source of competitive advantage. (Cabrera et al, 2006; Hsu et al, 2011; Liu and DeFrank, 2013) Of these antecedents, the influence of leadership has increasingly received the attention of researchers in recent years. Studies have begun to discuss how Ethical Leadership and Knowledge Sharing the leadership style of the immediate supervisors of employees impacts their knowledge-sharing performance. This is not surprising, because immediate leaders can always have a significant impact on the behavior of their subordinates. Regarding the influence of immediate leadership on knowledge sharing, most extant studies argue that positive leadership, like empowering and transformational leadership, has a positive impact on knowledge sharing (Liu and DeFrank, 2013; Wu and Lee, 2017), and negative leadership, such as abusive supervision, has a negative effect on knowledge sharing (Wu and Lee, 2016; Lee et al, 2018)

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