Managing intellectuals: Reaping the most and the best of knowledge workers in the post-COVID world

Abstract

The COVID-19 crisis forced massive changes in work practices, channeling most of the activities to digital/remote work paradigms almost overnight. In this post-COVID locked-in world, traditional top-down control and command mechanisms simply ceased to exist. Profoundly different approaches and understandings became necessary to reap the most and the best outcomes from workers. In this new paradigm, cultivating organisational citizenship behaviors might be the most – if not only – viable way to ensure comprehensive results and sustained success. That necessitates a highly rooted insight into the influences of leadership styles. This article discusses the constructs of transactional leadership and transformational leadership styles. Contextualisation of the data patterns investigates the interrelationships between these two styles by comparing and contradicting their effects on organisational citizenship behaviors. It explains how these two approaches work in tandem for better results, mutually enabling each other, like the two legs of an athlete, where the lack of one profoundly cripples the outcomes, making the other ineffective as well. Using a survey inquiring about the perceptions of online knowledge workers, a three-step analysis was conducted and, as a result, established a robust argument that these two leadership styles are not paradoxical; they need not be mutually exclusive or contradicting can enable and complement each other. This finding is crucial for managing knowledge workers and knowledge workers as managers.