| The long tradition of leadership theory and research has not adequately addressed the role of leadership in managing information and knowledge, despite their importance to organizations. Consequently, with very few exceptions (e.g., Lord & Maher, 1991; and Fleishman, Mumford, Zaccaro, Levin, Korotkin, & Hein, 1991) information and knowledge management as key leader functions have not been systematically explored. This dissertation builds on the extant leadership and organizational literature by extending the theoretical framework built by Lord & Maher (1991) detailing the various means through which organizational leaders have an impact on organizational performance, and by extending ideas discussed by Fleishman et al. (1991) on taxonomic descriptions of leader behavior.; The specific objectives of this dissertation are twofold. First, this dissertation builds a theory of the role of leadership in information and knowledge management through a review of the leadership and knowledge management literatures. Second, this dissertation tests the hypothesis developed using CEO interviews published in the Harvard Business Review over a period of more than a decade. The theory built here suggests that information and knowledge management is a key function of executive leaders of organizations. CEO knowledge in the form of cause-effect beliefs is hypothesized to be positively related to organizational effectiveness and perceptions of leadership. Processes of knowledge management and customer-focused knowledge management are also hypothesized to relate to organizational effectiveness. Using the method of structured content analysis developed by Jauch, Osborn, & Martin (1980), this dissertation uses these HBR interviews and develops questionnaire instruments through which data were collected from respondents in a structured fashion. These published interviews with top executives of organizations (such as CEOs) were distributed to three groups of respondents, who then carefully read the interviews and responded to the structured questions that had been developed for the purpose of assessing the relevant constructs in the study. The independent variables are knowledge in the form of cause-effect beliefs, knowledge management and customer-focused knowledge management processes. The dependent variables are leadership perceptions and organizational effectiveness.; The structured content analysis method yielded fairly high scale reliabilities for all of the constructs in the study. Further, acceptable levels of inter-rater reliability in the form of both correlations and coefficient of agreement were found, allowing a sufficient degree of confidence in the use of these data in testing hypotheses. Regression analysis, using the overall average across respondent types, on each of the scale measures, yielded strong results for the impact of the independent variables on measures of performance and perceptions of leadership. The major hypotheses, relating cause-effect beliefs held by the CEOs and their knowledge management practices to performance measures and leadership perceptions, were supported. The hypothesis relating customer-focused knowledge management practices of the CEOs to organizational effectiveness was not supported. |
