Exploring the impact of empowering leadership on knowledge sharing, absorptive capacity and team performance in IT service

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to empirically investigate the mechanism through which empowering leadership of a team leader might influence the team performance in IT service. Design/methodology/approach – The data of 315 individuals collected from 85 different IT projects through online survey is used to empirically test the hypotheses. Findings – The results confirm that team leader0s empowering leadership raises the level of knowledge sharing among team members and increase the absorptive capacity of the team, and lead to better team performance. Research limitations/implications – This research theoretically presented and demonstrated the middleand long-term impacts of empowering leadership resulting from the development of absorptive capacity as the effects of knowledge sharing in an IT project team are produced through absorptive capacity. Practical implications – The findings indicate that more effective in increasing the performance of IT project teams can be to strengthen empowering leadership than to promote traditional charisma or directive leadership. Knowledge sharing at a team level has the direct effect of improving project performance by providing information and knowledge regarding the related project, but on the other hand it contributes to making stronger the path of associating absorptive capacity with project performance. Originality/value – The impact of empowering leaderships on team performance of IT project has received less research attention. Little prior research has carried out such an integrated analysis in IT service context. This study contributes to knowledge management research by identifying a key antecedent of knowledge sharing.