نقش رهبری تحول گرا و فرایندهای مدیریت دانش در پیش بینی محصول و نوآوری فرایند: یک مطالعه تجربی توسعه یافته در بحرین

Organizational innovation has always been considered as a powerful tool to sustain competitive advantage and to provide high value to customers. The purpose of this study is to empirically investigate the role of transformational leadership and knowledge management process on predicting product and process innovation. Data collected from 119 service firms located in Kingdom of Bahrain were used to test a conceptual model encompassing the linkages among transformational leadership, knowledge management process, product innovation, and process innovation. Results of hierarchical regression analyses showed that transformational leadership has direct influence over product and process innovation, and employees’ day-to-day involvement in the knowledge management process such as acquiring, transferring, and applying knowledge have positive associations with product and process innovation. Findings also revealed that knowledge transfer and application partially mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and product innovation; knowledge acquisition and application completely mediated the relationship between transformational leadership and process innovation.

Firms nowadays focus on developing appropriate leadership behaviors to confront intensive competitive pressure and to manage turbulent and uncertain environment. In order to help firms, researchers proved that transformational leadership behavior is very effective to improve organizational performance during uncertain environment and to achieve competitive advantage (for example, Nemanich & Keller, 2007). To improve organizational innovative capability, transformational leaders empower employees by providing sufficient autonomy to decide the way to perform job activities, promote organizational learning, and support employees to utilize all the available resources required to improve creativity (Aragon-Correa et al., 2007, Gumusluoglu and Ilsev, 2009 and Jung et al., 2008). Organizations nowadays concentrate highly on activities that harness employees’ knowledge to create organizational knowledge. Therefore, they create a knowledge management system in which knowledge infrastructure supports to implement knowledge management process. As a result, this system transforms organizational resources into capabilities, which become unique to the organizations. Apart from transformational leadership, knowledge management practices also have potential to improve the level of organizational innovation. For example, knowledge transfer between organizational units promotes organizational learning and mutual cooperation, which in turn, help the organization to create a new knowledge and to improve innovation (Tsai, 2001). The above theories of transformational leadership and knowledge management have been given more attention for empirical investigations due to its powerful influence over organizational innovation and performance. Interestingly, though the additive effects of these theories on organizational innovation have sufficiently been explored in the literature, the additive effects of transformational leadership and knowledge management process on product and process innovation have not been explored in depth. There is also a dearth of studies explaining the combined effects of these theories on product and process innovation in the leadership literature. In this direction, this study develops a conceptual model (Fig. 1) and tests this model among service firms located in Kingdom of Bahrain. In particular, the purposes of this study are to examine the influence of transformational leadership and knowledge management process on both product and process innovation and to examine the role of knowledge management process in the relationship between transformational leadership and product and process innovation.

This study contributed and added value to leadership literature through its three findings. First, it was found that transformational leadership has direct influence over product innovation and process innovation. This study is first of its kind to explore the relationship between leadership and innovation concepts separately, as most of the research studies focused innovation as a single construct. Second, knowledge management process variables have had certain positive associations with product innovation and process innovation. In particular, knowledge transfer and knowledge application were related to product innovation, whereas knowledge acquisition and knowledge application were associated with process innovation. Third, this study reported that transformational leaders improve product innovation by encouraging knowledge transfer and knowledge application among organizational members. Further, these leaders’ involvement in acquisition of knowledge from the external environment and application of new knowledge helped them to improve process innovation. Although this study adds value to the literature, it also has certain limitations, and therefore, cautions are required to generalize the findings of this study to all the service firms. First, the responses for transformational leadership and knowledge management process measures were collected from human resource manager of a firm, and so the presence of common method bias could not be eliminated while analyzing data. Second, responses were not collected from certain sectors of service firms, for example, airlines and public educational institutions, and therefore, the sample did not completely represent the population of the study. Third, this study reported the subjective measures of product innovation and process innovation instead of objective measures. Lastly, influence of knowledge management infrastructure and interrelationships among knowledge acquisition, knowledge transfer, and knowledge application were not considered in this study. In future, the mediation role of knowledge management infrastructure will be focused in the relationship between transformational leadership and product innovation and between transformational leadership and process innovation, and the interrelationships among knowledge management system variables will also be explored. Further, the relationship between transformational leadership and knowledge management process could also be extended to predict competitive advantage.