As organizations have become increasingly reliant on technology and data to perform their duties, the pressure on their executives has increased proportionally. Leaders must guide and motivate their teams in order for their companies to meet the requirement of continuously developing new innovation and information frameworks. Therefore, the purpose of current study is to examine the influence of participative leadership on employee innovative work behavior through the mediating role of employee knowledge sharing attitude and absorptive capacity in the context of project-based information technology (IT) organizations in Portugal. This study included 306 IT professionals working in different public and private IT organizations. The statistical techniques employed for the analysis of collected data. IBM SPSS Statistical Version 23 and Smart PLS Version 4 were used for data analysis. The result revealed that participatory leadership has a significant and positive effect on employee innovative work behavior. In addition, absorptive capability and employee knowledge sharing attitudes were significant mediators between participative leadership and employee innovative work behavior. The current recommendation is that leaders who are comprehensive, moral, engaging, attentive, and have a crystal-clear vision may inspire their followers to adopt novel approaches to their jobs. Lastly, we discussed future possibilities and the theoretical and practical implications of our findings.
Martis et al. (Wed,) studied this question.