The Impact of Leadership on Knowledge

Introduction

The industries in mainland of China are losing their most competitive strength, low labor cost, which used to attract a great deal of foreign investment and contribute to international trade surplus. So it is widely observed that the society we live in has been gradually turning into a “knowledge society” (Toffler 1990). “As the basis on of competition has shifted more and more to the creation and assimilation of knowledge, the role of nation has grown. Competitive advantage is created and sustained through a highly localized process” (Porter 1990). Indeed, knowledge will be the power when it is localized（Wang 1997）. So organizational knowledge creation received a new wave of attention among academics and managers in the past two decades. Not only socio-economic theorists such call for our attention to the importance of knowledge as management resource and power, but also an increasing number of scholars in the fields of industrial organization, technology management, management strategy, and organizational theory have begun to theorize about management of knowledge (Zhou 2008). However, the impact of leadership on knowledge creation received little attention. The aim of my research proposal is to analyze the impact of leadership in knowledge creation and find a way to make the process of knowledge creation more efficient.

The research proposal is arranged as follows: the next section presents a review of management literature on the management in knowledge creation. In the following section, the project description is embodied in details.

1． Literature review

1.1 Knowledge

Knowledge is different from data and information. The notion of knowledge in knowledge management has been discussed for almost 20 years. Beckman (1997) argued that knowledge is kind of reasoning about information to actively guide task execution,