Exploring The Effect Of Technical Function And Transformational Leadership On Knowledge Sharing In Mobile Virtual Team

With the popularity of mobile devices such as smartphones and the development of mobile collaboration,the mobile virtual team based on enterprise mobile social media has become the most commonly used form for project cooperation.Knowledge sharing is an important factor in improving the performance of mobile virtual teams.However,the fragmentation of members and the complexity of organizational boundaries have hindered knowledge sharing,especially tacit knowledge sharing among team members.How to promote knowledge sharing behavior in mobile virtual teams is an important issue faced with the mobile virtual team.Transformational leadership has been proven to be able to promote the knowledge sharing behavior by reducing the obstacles caused by the complexity of organizational boundaries.Previous research has shown that the dependence on information technology in virtual teams leads to the reduction of face-to-face communication,which is not conducive for leaders to demonstrate transformational leadership behavior.Thus,the effect of transformational leadership on knowledge sharing may change in the mobile virtual team.Moreover,technical function also has an impact on knowledge sharing behavior.In this context,the effect of both technical function and transformational leadership on knowledge sharing behavior deserves further study.Based on social cognition theory,this research proposes a research model of how transformational leadership affect knowledge sharing behavior through individual cognition,and the technical function of mobile social media are added into the model.In this model,the two kinds of mobile social media functions,social connection and information processing,are proposed as moderators.This study collects data through an experiment.The experiment invited 178 college students to form 10 mobile virtual teams.Each team needs to complete collaborative innovation tasks within 2-3 months and fill out the feedback questionnaires.Results show that in the mobile virtual team,the transformational leadership has a positive impact on the knowledge sharing through individual cognition.The social connection function positively moderates the effect of transformational leadership on mutual trust and information processing function positively moderates the effect of self-efficacy on the tacit knowledge sharing behavior.Lastly,the research gives a discussion of the data analysis results,as well as the theoretical and practical contributions,the limitations of our study and further research are also presented.