An investigation of antecedents of knowledge management among hospitality employees, with the focus on human factors, related to leaders and subordinates.

Abstract

This study examines how leaders and managers can influence knowledge management (KM) among front line hospitality employees. For this purpose, this study investigates knowledge oriented leadership (KOL), supervisory orientations, and Leader Member Exchange (LMX), as antecedents of KM. This thesis also examines the mediating effect of employee work attitudes, i.e. affective commitment, creative self-efficacy, and employee work engagement in the relationship of KM with KOL and LMX. It also discusses employee goal orientations including learning orientation, and performance orientation as mediator in the relationship of KM practices with supervisory orientations. This study also explores the right combination of leadership behaviours with different personality traits of employees i.e. which leadership behaviour works best with which personality trait in order to predict KM among employees. Furthermore, this thesis emphasises on the importance of KM in the hospitality sector by discussing service quality, service quality efficacy, and employee innovative work behaviour (IWB) as service outcomes of KM among employees. Furthermore this study explores the factors influencing the use of information system (IS) to create knowledge, through qualitative research methods. The qualitative findings can help the leaders and managers to take the actions accordingly in order to encourage employees to create knowledge. To identify the types of knowledge workers in the hospitality industry, cluster analysis is also conducted, to divide the employees into the clusters of low potential knowledge workers, loyal learners, moderate knowledge workers, personality driven knowledge workers, and high potential knowledge workers. Qualitative findings of the study are based on semi structured interviews of hospitality employees. For the quantitative study, this study collects primary data from 330 front line hospitality employees. To test the impact of leadership and managerial styles on KM, and to test the service outcomes of KM, this study uses SPSS, Smartpls, and AMOS graphics to apply structural equation modelling. For the cluster analysis, hierarchical clustering is employed using the wards method and Euclidian distance measure, which is followed by K-Mean clustering. Expectation maximization (EM) technique is applied to replace the missing values. Furthermore, the role of the demographics in determining the cluster membership is also examined. This research found that there is positive association of KOL with KM, creative self-efficacy, affective commitment, and employee work engagement. Furthermore, these work attitudes partially mediate the relationship of KOL and KM practices among employees. This study also found the positive and direct effect of supervisory end result and capability orientation on employee learning orientation. However, results do not support the negative influence of supervisory activity orientation on employee learning goal orientation. Supervisory end result orientation does not affect employee performance orientation significantly, however supervisory activity orientation is positively associated, and supervisory capability orientation is negatively associated with employee performance orientation. Results also found the positive association between employee learning goal orientation and KM practices, but no association is found between employee performance orientation and KM practices. Finally, supervisory end result orientation and capability orientation are found to have positive indirect effects on KM practices, but the indirect negative association of activity orientation and KM practices is not supported by the results. Results also indicate that LMX significantly and positively affects knowledge management, directly, and also indirectly through employee affective commitment, work engagement, and creative self-efficacy. Then this study examines the effect of KM on service outcomes, and reveals a positive direct effect of KM on employee and service quality efficacy. Furthermore, KM indirectly and positively affects service quality through employee and service quality efficacy. Results also support the direct positive effect of Service quality efficacy, and employee on service quality. Through qualitative data analysis this study explores different reasons why employees use IS to analyse multiple information in order to create new knowledge. Furthermore, qualitative methodology is also used to confirm the quantitative findings with a different approach. Qualitative results categorize the factors into three major categories: organizational, job related, and employee personal factors. Results of cluster analysis reveal that employee attitudes, personality traits, and goal orientation plays a crucial role to differentiate the knowledge workers. Furthermore, demographic factors including gender, education, and work experience are crucial in determining the cluster membership. Comparison of clusters through Mann-Whitney test indicates that cluster of high potential knowledge workers is most suitable for knowledge work, and loyal learners are the least suitable. Kruskal-Wallis test shows that cluster membership plays a significant role in influencing KM among employees. This thesis contributes to the existing knowledge by improving and extending the construct of KOL, and also by examining the role of KOL in predicting KM, for the first time in the hospitality sector. It investigates the creative self-efficacy, and work engagement as predictor of KM among hospitality employees. It also examines employee affective creative self-efficacy, commitment, and employee work engagement as mediators in the association of KOL and KM, for the first time. Hospitality researchers mainly discuss knowledge sharing, which is only one element of KM , other practices like documenting, and applying need further research. This study considers the whole construct of KM which is the combination of knowledge acquiring, transfering, documenting, and applying the knowledge. Eexamination of indirect association of supervisory orientations with KM, through the mediation of goal orientation is one of the main achievement and contribution of this research thesis. Another contribution of this study is the ranking of the given set of leadership behaviours according to personality trait of employees, which provides a framework of leadership behaviour in accordance with employee personality trait to positively influence KM. it also contributes by establishing the connection between four different concepts in a single model i.e. KM, employee IWB, employee service quality efficacy, and service quality. Existing hospitality literature does not investigate the indirect effect of KM on service quality through IWB, and service quality efficacy. This study fills this gap. In the broader perspective it is the first study to discuss the use of IS for knowledge creation, especially in the hospitality sector. By exploring the factors influencing the IS use, this study also propose enhancements in the existing technology acceptance model (TAM) which incorporates very few factors. This study goes a step further than the technology acceptance, as it discusses the use of IS specifically to create knowledge. Furthermore this study categorise the factors influencing the IS use for knowledge creation as organizational factors, personal factors, and job related factors. Clustering of hospitality employees as low potential knowledge workers, loyal learners, moderate knowledge workers, personality driven knowledge workers, and high potential knowledge workers is also a major contribution, which can be used by hospitality managers for number of purposes.