Leaders Boundary Activities and Employee Knowledge Sharing: The Mediating Role of Creative Self-Efficacy

Abstract

The challenges contemporary work organizations face, including the rise of global competition, increase of task complexity, and changes in work structures, calls for leaders to expand their leadership scope by engaging in boundary activities. In spite of this growing need, research on the impact of the leaders boundary activities on major employee behaviors and attitudes at the workplace has been almost void. Addressing the literary gap, this study examined the impact of the leaders boundary activities on desired employee behavior including knowledge sharing and creative self-efficacy. Specifically, the current study investigated the relationship between the leaders boundary activities and employee knowledge sharing, and the mediating effect of employee creative self-efficacy. Further, this study investigates the moderating effect of leader-member exchange and learning goal orientation. Results show that the leaders boundary activities do positively predict employee knowledge sharing behavior. In addition, this positive relationship was mediated by employee creative self-efficacy. Finally, results show that the employees learning goal orientation moderated the relationship between the leaders boundary activities and employee creative self-efficacy, such that, the employees strong learning goal orientation strengthened the positive relationship between the main constructs. The theoretical and practical implications of the findings are discussed for future studies.