Exploring the impact of empowering leadership on knowledge sharing, absorptive capacity and team performance in IT service

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the mechanism through which empowering leadership of a team leader might influence the team performance in IT service. Design/methodology/approach – The data of 315 individuals collected from 85 different IT projects through online survey is used to empirically test the hypotheses. Findings – The results confirm that team leader′s empowering leadership raises the level of knowledge sharing among team members and increase the absorptive capacity of the team, and lead to better team performance. Research limitations/implications – This research theoretically presented and demonstrated the middle- and long-term impacts of empowering leadership resulting from the development of absorptive capacity as the effects of knowledge sharing in an IT project team are produced through absorptive capacity. Practical implications – The findings indicate that more effective in increasing the performance of IT project teams can be to strengthen empowering le...

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