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Information Technology or IT practices is one of the ten established Knowledge Management (KM) practices that define modern business organizations (Hussinki et al., 2017). Though the total spending on IT solutions and tools by industries is rapidly increasing, it is crucial to understand that each IT project has unique complexities and suffers from communication, team management, and resource allocation challenges (Andersen, 2016). From a strategic viewpoint, the problem persists because of the lack of operative and effective knowledge management system. In technical organizations, such a system can capture the varied behavioural and individual-level factors that affect right knowledge acquisition, creation, and sharing (Vachon & Klassen, 2008; Dalkir, 2017).
Leadership has a two-way positive causal relationship with KM success. It acts as an enabler for successful KM implementation, and a successful KM, in turn, reinforces knowledge leadership (Jennex et al., 2012). In the context of IT project management, understanding the leadership role of a project manager is vital as he/she is accountable for a project’s success or failure (Anantatmula, 2010). Knowledge-holders are the primary resources for team and project performance that strengthens the importance of knowledge leadership in knowledge-based firms (Merat & Bo, 2013).
It is observed that despite fewer advances in project management (PM) discipline, many projects fail (Williams, 2005). To date, the practitioners and academicians are perplexed by the poor performance and frequent failures of IT projects (Haq et al., 2019). Apart from the cost and schedule deviances and overruns, factors such as low team morale, lack of skills and domain knowledge, low commitment from employees and other stakeholders play a critical role in IT project failures (Kerzner, 2006). However, organizational constraints that try to control costs, resource allocation, and human efforts, undermine the positive impact of informal dynamics for knowledge creation in project management. In the context of IT, a project's good performance or success is defined as the ability of the project to get completed within a predefined time and budget. It also entails the criterion of low reported bugs from the customer (Sirisomboonsuk et al., 2018).
It is a well-known fact that leadership focuses on people issues (Avolio & Bass, 1988). From the perspective of knowledge management in knowledge-intensive firms, the effects of varied leadership styles have been studied. Though contemporary leadership style such as transformational leadership has been studied in the context of knowledge-intensive firms (Bass, 1999), researchers are not clear about the outcomes of such leadership style under conditions of employee’s high psychological empowerment (Millar, Chen, & Waller, 2017). Moreover, the underlying concept of a transformational leader is highly ideological, and a gap still exists between the “ideal” and “actual” leader behaviours (Viitala, 2004). Researchers found shared leadership across hierarchies is effective than any focused leadership in knowledge-intensive organizations (Merat et al., 2013). However, leadership in a firm may not be practical or suffice with one of the centralized or shared approaches (Gronn, 2002).