How leadership enhances employees’ knowledge sharing: the intervening roles of relational and organizational identification

Knowledge exchange among employees is crucial to organizational effectiveness. Leadership can enhance or detract from employees’ willingness to share knowledge. This study examines how leadership affects knowledge sharing in a knowledge-intensive work setting. It proposes and tests a model which posits that (1) transformational leadership affects the extent to which employees identify with their manager; (2) this relational identification, mediated by the quality of LMX (Leader-Member Exchange), leads to greater identification with the organization and its goals, which in turn results in greater knowledge sharing. The sample consisted of two hundred and three R&D employees engaged in advanced technological projects. Path analysis results indicated that there are both direct and indirect (through LMX) relationships between transformational leadership and relational identification: relational identification promotes organizational identification which, in turn, is positively related to knowledge sharing. These results highlight the importance of transformational leadership and LMX for promoting relational and organizational identification, thereby facilitating employee knowledge sharing.     

Leadership, behavioral context, and the performance of work groups in a knowledge-intensive setting

The behavioral work context in which members of groups interact with each other is crucial for facilitating knowledge exchange and combination (Nonaka in Great minds in management: the process of theory development, Oxford University Press, Oxford 2005; Nonaka et al. in Long Range Plan 33:5–34, 2000). Yet little is known about the ways leaders, by signaling expectations and exhibiting supportive behaviors, facilitate such a behavioral context, which may then enhance performance. This study aims to contribute to the literature by examining how leader expectations and supportive behaviors facilitate behavioral integration and enhance the performance of work groups engaging in the development of advanced technological products. Data collected from management teams of 102 work groups indicate significant and positive relationships between: (1) leader expectations and leader supportive behaviors, (2) leader supportive behaviors and group behavioral integration, and (3) behavioral integration and group performance. In addition, the results indicate that leader supportive behaviors partially mediate the relationship between leader expectations and group behavioral integration, and the latter partially mediates the link between leader supportive behaviors and group performance. No significant link was found between leader expectations and group performance. In so doing, this study contributes to research on the way leaders, by shaping a behavioral context, facilitate knowledge exchange and combination, thereby enhancing group performance.     

Gorbachev's Economic Reform: A Soviet Economy Roundtable

The proceedings of a panel of American specialists devoted to the recent economic reform are summarized. The panelists noted that the most substantial changes to date have accompanied efforts to restructure the decisionmaking hierarchy—in particular, a recentralization of authority through the creation of biuros and state committees and legislation on individual economic activity. Changes in the systems of economic planning and incentives, on the other hand, have been minor, suggesting a continuing debate over the extent to which price reform and various economic incentives should be implemented. Journal of Economic Literature, Classification Numbers: 052, 113, 124.     

Russia and Caspian Oil: Moscow Loses Control

A senior specialist on the Soviet and Russian economies examines issues surrounding the prominence of Caspian Sea oil in Russian policy. Attention is devoted to the evolution of Russian policy toward ownership of seabed resources, participation in international development consortia, and the routes, construction, and ownership of pipelines connecting the Caspian to world markets. Each issue is treated as one that engages the economics, politics, and security dimensions of international relations. Alternative scenarios for the future are outlined.     

Creating Public Sector Pedestals and Examining Falls from Grace: Examining ICMA Ethical Sanctions

The International City and County Management Association, (ICMA), ensures that members who engage in misconduct are identified and sanctioned. Dozens of public sanctions have been issued over the past 20 years, and this paper considers the substance of these penalties. The article identifies the processes used to ensure compliance with its code of ethics. We report the types of ethical violations ICMA has discovered through these processes. A more systematic way of recording what is occurring is necessary if strategies are to be devised to help current and upcoming public administrators avoid similar violations. Finally, we ask public administrators who have been sanctioned by ICMA to explain how and why the ethics violations occurred and the impact of the public censure on their personal lives and careers.     

The British general election of 2010 under different voting rules

The 2010 British election resulted in what the British refer to as a “hung Parliament” for the first time in over a generation. This result further heightened the debate over the fairness and utility of the nation’s centuries-old first-past-the-post (FPTP) system. Survey data are used to simulate the election outcome under four different electoral systems beyond FPTP: round-robin pair-wise comparisons, the Borda count, the alternative vote, and Coombs' method. Results suggest that in 2010, the Liberal-Democrats were Condorcet preferred to all other parties and would have won a national election under every tested method except the alternative vote, the method supported by the Liberal-Democrats during the referendum in May 2011 and, of course, FPTP as actually used.     

Between warning and response: The case of the Yom Kippur War

Reforming Japanese Intelligence

James Hansen: Japanese Intelligence: The Competitive Edge NIBC Press, National Intelligence Book Center, Washington , D.C., 1996, 222 p., $29.95.

Ichiro Ozawa: Blueprint for a New Japan: The Rethinking of a Nation Kodansha International, New York, 1994, 208 p., $25.00. English translation of Nihon Kaizo Keikaku (1993).

Masao Miyamoto: Straitjacket Society: An Insider's Irreverent View of Bureaucratic Japan Kodansha International, New York, 1994, 197 p., $22.00. English translation of Oyakusko no Okite (1993).

It's Warmer Inside

Michael Smith: New Cloak, Old Dagger: How Britain's Spies Came In From the Cold Victor Gollancz, London, 1996, 338 p., £20.00

Saving U.S. Convoys from U‐boats

Kathleen Broome Williams: Secret Weapon: U.S. High‐Frequency Direction Finding in the Battle of the Atlantic Naval Institute Press, Annapolis, Md., 1996, $35.00

Getting Serious About Intelligence

Angelo Codevilla: Informing Statecraft: Intelligence for a New Century The Free Press, New York, 1992, 491 p., $24.95

Matters Still Unresolved

Harvey Klehr and Ronald Radosh: The Amerasia Spy Case: Prelude to McCarthyism Chapel Hill, N.C., University of North Carolina Press, Chapel Hill, N.C., 266 p., $29.95     

Domestic drivers of transgovernmental regulatory cooperation

Transgovernmental cooperation among domestic regulators has generated considerable interest among scholars and policymakers. While previous research has focused on describing such regulatory networks, we know very little about what drives individual jurisdictions to join them. The question of membership is important because it determines the reach of rules and standards promulgated by a given network, and because it is logically prior to understanding the rulemaking dynamic within a network. We develop a set of hypotheses that highlight the role of domestic political factors in shaping network membership. Our empirical analysis, using an original data set for transgovernmental cooperation in securities and insurance regulation, finds that the institutional form of domestic market regulation, as well as the relative domestic weight of the industry, are closely correlated with membership. All else equal, jurisdictions with independent regulatory agencies and those where the industry in question represents a large share of gross domestic product are much more likely to join the respective network than jurisdictions without these characteristics. The paper underscores the important interactions between domestic and international factors for informal cooperation, an issue that has become increasingly central to global governance.