Authentic leadership and knowledge sharing in state-owned enterprises of China: An Empirical Study

In recent years, both public sector agencies or private enterprises and even non-profit organizations, in violation of integrity and even illegal events endless. So, a genuine and honest leader is an important success factor in maintaining organizational running, and the authentic leadership is regarded as the foundation of business success. An authentic leadership use positive moral values to lead employees, and they through high moral standards and values of behavior and languages be the paradigm. This study thought that if organizations’ leaders are able to lead the employees through the authentic leadership, it should be able to effectively influence the first-line employees and executives that to transform their mental capital and knowledge-sharing willingness, and even improve the organization's operational performance. In this study, we used multiple regression to examine hypothesis and there were 428 valid questionnaires collected from staffs of state-owned enterprises in China. The results show: authentic leadership has a significant correlation to psychological capital, and psychological capital has significant correlation with knowledge sharing; authentic leadership has a significant relevance to knowledge sharing. Finally, psychological capital appears mediating effects between authentic leadership and knowledge sharing. In the end, this study is to explore whether the organization's authentic leadership can use the psychological capital to make the employee willing to have the knowledge sharing behavior.