Does Participative Leadership Promote Employee Innovative Work Behavior in IT Organizations

The responsibilities of leaders have grown as a result of information technology organizations’ increasing reliance on information and development to carry out their work. It is important for leaders to guide and support organizations as they respond to the challenges of continually generating new innovation and information frameworks. The participative initiative, therefore, is characterized as an authority that draws on part data and part insight to reduce progressive obstructions by including individual hierarchical individuals in the decision-making process. The participative initiative encourages a positive style of leadership in which the leader provides workers with the chance to partake in dynamic and critical thinking through consolation, backing, and impact. The purpose of this study is to investigate the influence of participative leadership on employee innovative work behavior through the mediating role of employee knowledge-sharing attitude and absorptive capacity, with project risk management as moderator. The non-probability convenience sampling technique was used and data collection occurred over three months from January 2022 to March 2022. As data collection took place in one time period, the design is cross-sectional in nature. The data were collected from 273 workers (i.e. engineering manager, project manager, project leader, team leader, software engineer, advisor, and expert) working in different public and private sector IT companies of Portugal. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic, both hard and soft copies of surveys were distributed via email. The analysis was performed using Smart PLS version 3.2.8. The results revealed that participative leadership had a direct effect on employee innovative work behavior that was positive and significant. Also, both the knowledge-sharing attitude and absorptive capacity of employees positively and significantly mediate the relationship between participative leadership and employee innovative work behavior. Project risk management, however, only significantly moderates the relationship between absorptive capacity and employee innovative work behavior. Lastly, some theoretical, practical implications, study limitations and future directions were discussed.