The Role of Transformational and Transactional Leadership in Creating, Sharing and Exploiting Organizational Knowledge

Strategy scholars have argued that managing knowledge effectively can provide firms with sustainable competitive advantages. Leaders are central to the process of managing knowledge effectively. Managing knowledge includes three key processes: creating, sharing, and exploiting knowledge. Leaders are central to each of these processes at multiple levels of the firm. Examining the role of leadership in converting knowledge into competitive advantages is important to our understanding of leaders and organizations. Transformational leadership may be more effective at creating and sharing knowledge at the individual and group levels, while transactional leadership is more effective at exploiting knowledge at the organizational level. This paper begins to integrate the transformational leadership literature with the organizational knowledge literature.