Leadership of knowledge workers in knowledge - based organizations: the role of job characteristics on work performance

The Purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of work characteristics (including task characteristics, knowledge characteristics and social characteristics) on the work performance of knowledge workers in knowledge - based organizations in Iran. also, the moderating effect of work involvement on the relationship between these variables was investigated. The method of this research is descriptive - correlational. The statistical population of this research includes all the employees of the knowledge - based organizations of East Azarbayjan province. 215 knowledge workers were selected by convenience sampling method. A questionnaire including 65 questions distributed and 215 questionnaires were collected. To examine the hypotheses of the research, correlation and path analysis tests were used by SPSS and LISREL software. The results of path analysis revealed that task and knowledge characteristics have a significant effect on task and contextual performance, but social characteristics affect only contextual performance and don’t have a significant effect on task performance. Based on moderated Structural Equation Modeling (SEM), work involvement moderates the relationships between task characteristics and task performance, knowledge characteristics and task performance and also moderates the relationships between social characteristics and contextual performance. Findings of this research suggest that knowledge leaders in knowledge - based organizations have to redesign task characteristics and knowledge characteristics for better job performance and to improve the contextual performance, they have to consider the social characteristics of the job.