The Nature of Leadership in the Knowledge Era : A Study of Indian Knowledge Organizations

The main purpose of this paper is to figure out the nature, prevalence and distribution of Leadership as perceived by the 204 Knowledge workers in the six selected Knowledge Organizations and how the leadership behaviors, incorporated by Likert and Likert (1976) to classify System 1 to 4, are re-classified and re-categorized into perceived leadership role and perceived behavioral attributes of leadership and how they vary across these six Knowledge Organizations on the sectoral lines as well as in the perception of different genders. This empirical research study derived four new categories of behaviors or practices or actions. One perceived leadership role of Expressive Environment Facilitator and three perceived behavioral attributes of Non-Bossy leadership, Democratic leadership, and Expectancy leadership are derived for Knowledge Organizations. The positive perceived leadership behavioral components are significantly more prevalent in IT sector than power sector. The negative leadership behavioral component is significantly less prevalent in IT sector than power sector. There is no significant difference in the perceived leadership role and behavioral components