- Title
- Leadership and working guanxi: their effect on knowledge sharing intention in Chinese financial institutions
- Creator
- Zhu, Wenting
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2018
- Description
- Professional Doctorate - Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)
- Description
- Knowledge sharing is gaining traction and many organizations are becoming aware of the knowledge risks. Firms face rapid changing business environment and they draw on their knowledge learning and innovation capabilities to create their competitive advantages. Knowledge sharing among employees allows organizations to minimize the loss of important knowledge and to exploit and capitalize on existing resources. Prior literatures identified that social exchange relationship does have an impact on employee’s knowledge sharing behaviour. Although much of the knowledge sharing research has been extensively conducted in the Western contexts but the knowledge sharing initiatives such as leadership, leader-member exchange and team-member exchange have not been determined and intensively studied in the Chinese context. When managers and practitioners apply these initiatives into Chinese context, the understanding and insights are rather limited. Prior studies showed that knowledge sharing practice in the emerging economies is distinct from those in the well-developed economies, and some of these studies found that Chinese business practice can only be explained by adopting a Chinese perspective. Therefore, the research was dedicated to employ two indigenous constructs (working guanxi and paternalistic leadership) to examine their impact on employees’ knowledge sharing intention in the financial institutions in China, and to provide a parsimonious theoretical basis to the relationships between leadership, working guanxi and knowledge sharing intention. The aim of this thesis was to shed lights on how to enhance knowledge sharing practise in Chinese financial institutions through addressing the relationships among paternalistic leadership, working guanxi and knowledge sharing intention. The researcher applied both social exchange theory and social identity theory to form the theoretical basis of the conceptual framework and the research hypotheses. A quantitative cross-sectional research was conducted in Zhejiang Province of China and a total of 382 respondents, who worked in financial institutions, participated in this study. Structural equation modelling was performed to test the postulated hypotheses. The findings in this research revealed that three dimensions of paternalistic leadership had different impacts on working guanxi and knowledge sharing intention. Co-worker guanxi and supervisor-subordinate guanxi were found having opposite impact on the knowledge sharing intention. In particular, the co-worker guanxi indirectly mediated the relationship between benevolent leadership and knowledge sharing intention. The study of indigenous concepts of knowledge sharing intention enriched the current understanding of knowledge sharing practice in China and filled up the research gap by providing more comprehensive and precise observation on paternalistic leadership and working guanxi. This research identified certain leadership styles and their relationships with employee behaviour, provided managerial implications to business practitioners, and contributed to improve employees’ knowledge sharing behaviour for the building of a supportive culture in organization.
- Subject
- leadership; guanxi; knowledge sharing intention
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1388198
- Identifier
- uon:32724
- Rights
- Copyright 2018 Wenting Zhu
- Language
- eng
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| Thumbnail | File | Description | Size | Format | |||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT01 | Thesis | 7 MB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download | ||
| View Details Download | ATTACHMENT02 | Abstract | 173 KB | Adobe Acrobat PDF | View Details Download |