An Empirical Study on the Relationship between Developmental Leadership and Individual Knowledge Creation

Despite the fact that the source of organizational knowledge creation is the individual member in an organization, many studies on knowledge creation have been discussed at the organizational level. Research on knowledge creation at the individual level has been approached mainly from the perspective of the institutional practice related to human resource or organizational mechanism, and has not much studied knowledge creation in terms of the leadership of the middle manager and various employee’s organizational behavior. This study empirically analyzed the relationship between developmental leadership, employee effectiveness(job satisfaction, need for achievement, quality of relationship with coworkers) and knowledge creation at the individual level through the structural equation model. As a result of the analysis, although there was a correlation between developmental leadership and individual knowledge creation, the level of knowledge creation was high when employee effectiveness was mediated between two variables. This result suggests that the organization needs to consider attitudinal, motivational, and relational aspects of the employee and provide training in developmental leadership for middle managers in order to promote individual employees’ knowledge creation.