Leading in Knowledge Organizations - Essay Example

Since the number of such tasks is quite large in knowledge organizations, there is very little that senior and experienced superiors can do to assist their subordinates in the performance of these tasks. Leadership of knowledge employees gives a new meaning to the role of supervisors in these organizations. Supervisors in knowledge organizations, practically at any level of the hierarchy, cannot follow the leadership model of traditional organizations. (Gollobin 6-7) The major difference is that task characteristics in knowledge organizations require all knowledge employees to be leaders in some form.

In fact, ability to function as a leader should be a requisite skill for any person who accepts work assignments in any capacity in a knowledge organization. The challenges for managers lie in evolving practices that facilitate the functioning of every knowledge employee as a leader-a functional leader. Managers can do the following to turn employees into functional leaders: As a rule, managers should see that all knowledge employees, in some aspect of their work assignments, encounter situations that offer them opportunities to act as leaders.

Success with leadership situations can hasten lavish outcomes in more than one form for the organization. To encourage risk taking in these roles by employees, managers should increase intrinsic and extrinsic rewards from success on leadership initiatives. They should develop a desire in employees who successfully become functional leaders to draft visions for their departments and the courses to realize them. In preparation of leading others, knowledge employees can undertake extra efforts in learning how to influence or make others work to attain organizational goals.

Leadership in traditional organizations is not about leading others to attain outcomes of value to them, unless it happens to be a by-product of the firm's goals. Nevertheless, unlike these organizations, knowledge organization leadership, or the art of leading knowledge organizations, is not about using employees as "means" to attain goals that are espoused by the leader or others in the organization but is about making all knowledge employees individually form their visions relating to the tasks that they are doing and then helping others to successfully replicate their learning in similar situations such that new and unique knowledge tasks become less unique and uncertain.