Transformational And Transactional Leadership In Organizational Change:Examining The Mediating Role Of Knowledge Sharing And Testing Moderated Mediation Analysis

Organizational change is a risky effort.Most change initiatives fall short on their goals and produce high opportunity and process costs,which sometimes compensate the content benefits of organizational change.The believed is widely transactional that workplace is in a state of “change”.The organizations are implementing change programs such as downsizing,corporate mergers,restructuring,and sometime outsourcing in response to globalization and increased competition.So it can be said that organizational change is required for survival and prosperity of an organization.The frequent,planned and transformational changes are smaller but effective in organization,and many studies have been conducted in past about change,few of them identified the importance of leadership and employee participation in organizational change.Numerous queries have been addressed related to organizational change,leadership style(i-e: transformational and transactional),knowledge sharing,employee willingness for participation in change etc.as stated change is crucial for organization,but it depends on the leadership behavior because leadership can make the difference of success and failure.Leader behaviors played a key role in organizational change process,and it is extremely hard,if not outright impossible,for organizational change to be successful without the willing and proactive engagement of employees in organizational change,because in some studies the employee resistance has been cited as primary cause of change failure in organization.On other side the leadership behavior(i-e: transformational and transactional)creates the environment of knowledge sharing between employees and management for change.Sharing ideas need cooperative and helpful environment for willingly participation by employees.The implementation of transformational and transactional behavior of leadership were studied in ZONG telecom sector in employees' perspective.Then,questionnaire was developed on the basis of previous empirical research that has six variables.The questionnaires were distributed among the targeted population.One person from the management was assigned for coordination by HR department for data collection procedure.The questionnaires were distributed among 700 employees and usable data were 550 after initial screening(missing and incomplete questionnaires).The respondents were asked to complete the questionnaire measuring employees' perceptions on transformational / transactional behavior of leaders,knowledge sharing,willingness of employees' participation and organizational change.The survey was based on five point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree = 1 to strongly agree = 5.The data were analyzed for adequacy by normality,outliers,Skewness,and kurtosis etc.The data were investigated for exploratory factor analysis(EFA)and confirmatory factor analysis(CFA)for measurement of the constructs.Employee willingness has moderation effect on transformational / transactional leadership and knowledge sharing;knowledge sharing has the mediation effect on the relation between transformational / transactional leadership and organizational change.Willingness of employee has moderation effect on mediation between transformational / transactional leadership and organizational change and it is called moderated mediation and this term can be named as “conditional indirect effect”.As this study contains moderation,mediation,and moderated mediation,therefore,Barron and Kenny's concept was used for moderation,mediation,and latest concept was used for measurement of conditional indirect effect or moderated mediation.The data were investigated by SPSS and AMOS 21 st version.From further analysis it was found that knowledge sharing and transformational / transactional leadership have positive and significant relation.Organizational change has positive and significant relation with transformational and transactional leadership.Employee willingness showed moderation between knowledge sharing and transformational / transactional leadership.Knowledge sharing showed positive and significant mediation between transformational / transactional leadership and organizational change.The regression coefficient results show,that transformational / transactional leadership behavior have significant positive impact on organizational change.Transformational / transactional leadership have positive and significant effect on knowledge sharing.Similarly,knowledge sharing has significant effect on organizational change.Willingness of employees contributes in organizational change process.When employees and managers share their knowledge,this increased the chances of successful change in organization.The moderated mediation(conditional indirect effect)was found between transformational / transactional leadership and organizational change on the bootstrapping confidence interval(CI).The current study has key findings that can be summarized in points.First,this research examined a relational form of employee reactions to transformational / transactional leadership and the theory of change-oriented leadership(COL)behavior during times of change.Such an examination provides greater understanding of relationships among leadership,employee feedbacks,and change consequences.The study finds a conceptual model through integrating the perceptions oftransformational / transactional leadership,knowledge sharing,willingness to participate,and organizational change.Second,this study highlighted leadership as one of the key drivers of the execution of organizational change and emphasizes the importance of leadership during organizational change as previous studies did not explore that which leadership behavior is essential for but this dissertation explored specific behaviors of leadership like transformational / transactional leaderships to be effective for organizational change and tested empirically that these leadership behaviors have positive and significant association with organizational change.Third,transformational and transactional leadership were analyzed in one of the previous studies as promoting behaviors of leaders with employee willingness to participate in organizational change expansion.The results of this study explored that individual willingness has positive and significant moderation effect between transformational / transactional leadership and knowledge sharing that increases successful decisions made about organizational change,and employees and leaders understand mutual contract,which will bring change in organization as expected.Fourth,this study finds that transformational / transactional leadership behaviors are adding more value to knowledge sharing that leads successful organizational change,hence it can be said that transformational / transactional behaviors of leaders are proactive leadership style.Proactive leadership style focuses on the future.It always works multiple irons in the fire in order to figure out what's next for the organization.Proactive leaders are actively mentoring and teaching their employees to allow them to grow and be able to attract new opportunities.Finally these findings can also benefit the leaders who need to update their knowledge concerning international management practices(leadership styles,organizational change procedure,motivation of employees to engage in change process etc.)in this business area.In addition,it can help expatriates leaders and managers to understand their strengths and weaknesses,and helping them toward self-improvement.