Mostafa Sayyadi, Author, Transformational Leadership: How To Prosper as a Leader In Today's Hypercompetitive Environment

Leadership has been a focal point of organizations since the corporation was first initiated and will always be an ongoing issue for executives. Executives can use leadership to unlock knowledge for innovation and to motivate employees to solve their current problems in a more innovative manner.

Leaders can effectively unlock organizational knowledge by promoting the knowledge sharing process. Executives are using leadership which plays a critical role in developing interactions and relationships. Leaders in fact serve as an ideal vehicle to develop social networks, thereby providing further opportunities for employees to explore new ideas and knowledge. Important milestones in corporate culture could include motivation, which inspires employees to take risk-related efforts and generate more innovative solutions. The key is to unlock organizational knowledge through employing leadership that is considered an essential source for developing relationships. Thus, leadership is a necessary precursor to unlock knowledge and create new knowledge and ideas within companies.

Furthermore, a significant contribution to unlocking knowledge through implementing leadership aimed at enhancing inter-unit relationships within organizations. For instance, leaders could build a climate inspiring employees to share their knowledge, and facilitate the knowledge sharing process. Therefore, leadership for unlocking knowledge by enabling companies in exerting the knowledge sharing throughout the organization.

Moreover, executives are clearly the right focal point for developing networking with environmental components by developing relationships and interactions. They key here is to inspire their organizations as a whole to develop networking with more effective enterprises through employing leadership directed at setting highly desired expectations for employees. Thus, it is apparent that leadership provides a significant contribution to unlocking knowledge by facilitating the activities associated with networking. When executives adopt leadership, they can then positively affect unlocking knowledge within companies.  

In addition, leadership unlocks organizational knowledge aimed at providing valuable resources for all organizational members. Thus, executives apply leadership to enhance knowledge sharing among human capital and stipulate knowledge to be shared around the company. Sharing the best practices and experiences could positively impact some non-financial aspects of firm performance such as innovation, providing learning and growth opportunities for employees. Empowered employees can enable an organization to actively respond to environmental changes and collective-interests. The key is to take into consideration individual consideration to identify employees' needs and show concern for both organizational needs and employees’ interests concurrently. When executives show concern for the employees' individual needs, individuals begin to contribute more commitment and they become more inspired to put extra effort into their work. This extra effort improves the quality of products, customer satisfaction, and impacts the return on assets, sales, shareholder value, and improves operational risk management.

Leadership also highlights the vital importance of employee’s attitudes in accomplishing commercial objectives. For example, leaders can inspire employees through setting highly desired expectations. The higher the level of follower expectation and motivation enhances productivity and perhaps decreases organizational costs. Thus, leaders positively affect financial and non-financial performance through improving the price of stock, decreasing costs, increasing sales, improving innovation, increasing the rate of responses to environmental changes, improving the quality of products and services, along with a stronger customer focus and developing learning opportunities for employees. Therefore, this article suggests new insights to identify leadership as a primary driver of unlocking knowledge to improve performance at the organizational level.

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