The role of leadership in knowledge creation and transfer for organisational learning and improvement

Abstract

In understanding how leadership has an impact on improvement, this chapter examines how leadership fosters and sustains knowledge creation and transfer through organisational and inter-organisational learning. The value of organisational knowledge for creating strategic advantage in firms is well established (Nahapiet and Ghoshal 1998; Nonaka 1994), but its importance for public organisations has been underemphasised in both the policy and academic literature until recently. since then, research has been undertaken in healthcare (Bate and Robert 2002; Nicolini et al. 2008) and in local government (Rashman and Hartley 2002; Hartley and Benington 2006). However, across all sectors, there has been realtively little research on the role of leadership in the creation and transfer of organisational knowledge (Lakshman 2008; Rashman et al. 2009). In this chapter, we unpack and examine the concept of knowledge and the role of leadership in organisational elarning, both conceptually and empirically.