Content area
Full text
Introduction
The novel COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 has substantially changed the way people work. Because of the uncertainty and ambiguity related to the unprecedented global crisis, organizations have faced challenges in enabling employees to work productively and maintaining their job engagement during the disruption (Gallup, 2020). To successfully adapt to the changing environment and cultivate productivity, the active role of individual employees in countering such a crisis is as important as the organizations’ efforts to deal with it. In particular, employees’ active knowledge-sharing behavior has great potential to help organizations make quick and effective decisions and be resilient in a crisis, as such behavior promotes free flow of useful and novel information within an organization (Wang and Noe, 2010). Knowledge management literature has long suggested that knowledge sharing enables organizations to develop competitive advantage and enhances employees’ capacity to come up with creative solutions (Jackson et al., 2006). Employees’ active information or knowledge sharing is even more critical in a crisis situation as it helps to identify and solve problems quickly and effectively (Kim and Rhee, 2011), which leads organizations to be innovative (Tulshyan, 2020). Therefore, it is necessary to build strategies to ensure open knowledge sharing among employees during a crisis.
Previous scholars have suggested leadership (e.g. transformational) as a key element in fostering employees’ knowledge sharing (Yin et al., 2019). Leadership behaviors are especially critical for the effective management of an organizational crisis to encourage employees to actively engage in knowledge behaviors (Adamu et al., 2016; Wooten and James, 2008). Among various types of leadership behaviors, diversity is essential for successful leadership in times of crisis (Kalev, 2020). The notion of diversity-oriented leadership is drawn from leadership inclusiveness that highlights leaders’ behaviors of openness, accessibility and availability (Carmeli et al., 2010; Nembhard and Edmondson, 2006). Beyond highlighting leaders’ behaviors that build interpersonal relationships with employees, it further emphasizes the importance of demonstrating a commitment to a workforce that is representative of all segments of society in terms of demographics and expertise (Moldogaziev and Silvia, 2015). As such, diversity-oriented leadership is conceptually broader than inclusive leadership as it denotes leaders’ behaviors of generating diverse sets of ideas from employees with different backgrounds. Supporting diversity not only motivates organizations to view...