Organizational Norms and Leadership Effectiveness: Do the Leader's Innovative Behavior and Knowledge Sharing Intention Matter?

Even though organizations are failing because of leadership ineffectiveness, there is no consensus on the secret behind leadership effectiveness. Therefore, this study is aimed to investigate the role of subjective organizational norms on leadership effectiveness with a specic contribution from a leader’s innovative behavior, knowledge sharing intention, and autonomy. To achieve this, I analyzed data collected from 104 Ethio Telcom employees using the ordinary least square (OLS) regression and hierarchical regression analysis. The result of the OLS regression revealed that organizational norms inuence leadership effectiveness indirectly through a leader’s innovative behavior. This relationship is intensied when the leader is intended to share knowledge more. Moreover, the presence of high autonomy among leaders leads to the development of innovative behavior among those leaders, which further improves the effectiveness of leaders. Besides the above ndings, future researchers should compare and contrast the above relationship among the leaders and employees. They should also test the role of other entrepreneurial variables such as risk-taking and proactiveness concerning leadership effectiveness.


Introduction
Organizations are failing because of ineffective leadership (Robertson and Williams, 2006) and leadership effectiveness considers as an outcome when the individuals in the positions of leadership can impact a group to perform their roles (Dhar & Mishra, 2001). One of the factors that determine this effectiveness might be the organizational norms. For instance, Vardiman, Houghton, & Jinkerson, 2006) stated that culture facilitates the development of effective leaders (Kargas & Varoutas, 2015). Besides, De Long and Fahey (2000) consider that organizational culture plays a fundamental role in the creation, sharing, and use of knowledge. They state that one of the major ways in which culture in uences knowledge management practices is by establishing norms.
Individuals have a positive attitude towards behaviors believed to be associated with desirable attributes and outcomes (Khari & Sinha, 2017). Some of these behaviors include; knowledge sharing intentions, innovative behavior, and autonomous behavior. For example, According to Ajzen, (2012), subjective social norms in uence the development of behavioral intentions. Nevertheless, their intention to behave in a certain way, are attenuated when they believe they do not have the resources or opportunities to act that way (Ajzen, 2012). Therefore, leaders in uence employees' innovative behavior, and this individual innovation is central to organizational learning (Jong and Hartog, 2007) including knowledge sharing.
Scholars have recently started to explore leadership as a tool to address challenges and facilitate knowledge sharing in organizations (Khari & Sinha, 2017). Besides knowledge sharing, autonomy also leads to more proactive behavior and personal initiative (Foss et al., 2009). Cai et al., (2018) illustrate that under the condition of high job autonomy, servant leadership may lead to innovative work behavior. Concerning this, Jong and Hartog, (2007) address how leaders may in uence individual innovation.
Nowadays organizations suffer from poor supervision, poor interpersonal relationships, poor working conditions, and lack of healthy work conditions is a hindrance to employee motivation (Hocine and Zhang, 2014). The speci c business problem is some managers do not know the relationship between employees' sense of self-worth, subjective norms, attitudes, and intentions to share knowledge with other employees (Wu & Lin, 2013;Zhang & Ng, 2012;Roth, 2016). The problem is that organizations continue to fail due to ineffective leadership (Robertson and Williams, 2006). That means, one of the main causes of failure is the lack of effective leadership (Schmid and Adams, 2008;Hocine and Zhang, 2014). Employees may also be reluctant to share knowledge because of organizational culture norms, lack of trust, poor management support, absence of reciprocity, or fear of losing power (Sharma, Singh, & Neha, 2012;Roth, 2016).
Much of the early research in the area of leadership has focused on the identi cation of traits that would predict leadership effectiveness (eg. Personality and motivational variables are also considered as important predictors of leadership) (Reiter-Palmon, 2003). However, there are inconsistent ndings in the study of leader's innovative behavior and leadership, which requires recent developments that give attention to the speci c issues of innovative behaviors, autonomous, and knowledge sharing intentions.
For instance, Le Blanc et al., (2019) stated that identifying how leadership may stimulate work team innovative behavior. However, leadership models developed for more routine settings may not generalize to the leadership of innovative people (Mumford and Licuanan, 2004). Although innovative behavior is crucial, it has received very little attention from researchers (Jong and Hartog, 2007). Even though several studies considers the relationship between leadership style and innovation, the study of the role of innovative behavior towards leadership effectiveness is under-researched. It's also crucial to identify how the leaders become effective from their innovative behavior. Therefore, this research makes a novel contribution by revealing the role of a leader's innovative behavior in the relationship between social norms and leadership effectiveness. Particularly it focused on a leader's innovative behavior, while the majority of the previous studies deal with employee's innovative behavior.
The studies on the relationship between leadership and innovative behavior show inconsistent ndings. In general, this study tends to answer the following two research questions; 1) How do organizational norms affect leadership effectiveness? 2) Do knowledge sharing intentions have a role in the in uence of organization subject norms and leaders' innovative behavior? 3) Do leaders autonomous makes a difference in the relationship between innovative behavior and leadership effectiveness? Therefore this study investigates organizational subjective norms and leadership effectiveness, with special consideration of the leader's innovative behavior and knowledge sharing intention.

Organizational norms and leadership effectiveness
Institutional structures such as shared values, norms, accepted practices, or perceptions held by employees within an organization are usually described as "culture" (King, 2007). Leadership is an emergent phenomenon within complex systems, which interacts with elements such as culture, norms, trends, etc (Kargas & Varoutas, 2015). Leaders with strong leadership skills can shape a positive culture in the organization (Ionescu, 2014). Therefore, leadership and organizational culture are considered to be two of the most crucial organizational elements for rms to compete successfully (Kargas & Varoutas, 2015). According to Connelly et al. To be effective, leaders need to stimulate innovation through a consistent striving to provide their followers with high norms and support for innovative endeavors (Hülsheger et al., 2009). Moreover, Basadur (2004), notes that the most effective leaders will help individuals to coordinate and integrate their differing styles through a process of applied creativity (Jong and Hartog, 2007). As a part of organizational norms, task characteristics are manifold, and the tasks are taken together to determine the innovative activity ( which in uences leaders' effectiveness. Besides, leader autonomy is a cluster of supervisory behaviors that collectively promote a climate of support and understanding within leader-worker relationships (Reeve, 2015). That means when teams enjoy relatively high autonomy as well as high control over their work and ideas, their creativity ourishes (Patanakul et al., 2012). Accordingly, leaders play a crucial role in energizing change, creativity, innovation, and success of their organization, while other researches on the effects of an autonomy-supportive managerial style have found a variety of positive work outcomes (Hocine and Zhang, 2014).
A high level of job autonomy motivate greater innovative work behavior (Cai et al., 2018), and more freedom innovative of innovativeness (Patanakul et al., 2012). Even though the absence of possessing behavioral exibility does not necessarily result in poor leadership, leaders who do display these characteristics will be effective (Zaccaro et al., 2008;Slemp et al., 2018). Therefore, job autonomy is often presented as an important contextual factor in predicting employee creativity and innovation (Liu et al., 2011). Further, behavioral and cognitive exibility are distinct constructs and that both contribute uniquely to the prediction of leadership (Reiter-Palmon, 2003). That means, the entrepreneurial behavior (eg., innovative behavior) with exibility contributes more to leadership effectiveness. Given these discussions, it is of interest to determine whether innovative behavior would predict leadership with the moderation of leaders autonomous. Therefore, we hypothesized that; H3: The more the leaders are autonomous, the more the leader's innovative behavior in uences leadership effectiveness.

The role of knowledge sharing intentions
The behavior attitude is an essential antecedent of the intention to act that way and materialize the behavior, including knowledge sharing (Chen, Chuang, & Chen, 2012). The intention to share knowledge is a mental state of an information professional that represents his/her commitment to carrying out an action or actions of sharing knowledge (Adeyinka, 2015). Besides, individual innovation is central to  (Adeyinka, 2015). Further, the classic theory of reasoned action stated that the intention to engage in a speci c behavior is determined by attitudes towards that behavior as well as by perceptions of social norms (Cabrera and Cabrera, n.d.).
Subjective norms were signi cantly related to personal inclinations to share knowledge (Roth, 2016). Organizations, therefore, attempt to foster cultures characterized by spiritual aspects of interconnectedness, meaning, and purpose to promote a willing attitude towards knowledge sharing (Khari & Sinha, 2017). The subjective norm on knowledge-sharing is the social pressure to engage in or perform knowledge-sharing behavior (Chatzoglou & Vraimaki, 2009;Lin and Lee, 2004). Particularly, organizational culture can in uence knowledge sharing by creating an environment in which there are strong norms regarding the importance of sharing one's knowledge with others (Abdillah et al., 2018). Therefore, there is a necessity to test the in uence of organizational norms and innovative behavior at a different level of innovative behavior. That is; H4: The higher the leader's knowledge sharing intentions, the better the organizational norms facilitate for a leader's innovative behavior in uences leadership effectiveness.
In general, the following conceptual framework is developed

Research Setting and Design
This study aimed to determine the role of organizational subjective norms on leadership effectiveness, with special consideration of the leader's innovative behavior and knowledge sharing intention. To achieve this, explanatory research design was employed. This design is employed to investigate the role of organizational norms and rm performance with a speci c role of leader's innovative behavior, knowledge sharing intentions, and autonomy. To undertake this study, a total of 200 samples were selected from a total population of 5644 MSEs using Malhorta Naresh's sample size determination table.
In this process, a simple random sampling technique is used to take samples from the total population. Out of the 200 selected samples, a total of 122 responses were validated and analyzed. The researcher also administered a survey method to collect data from the target group of small enterprises.

Instruments
The items used for measuring the variables are mostly adopted from previous researches. Chatzoglou and Vraimaki (2009) developed a knowledge-sharing intention that measured on a ve-point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree and strongly agree. The sample item includes "I will try to share my knowledge with my colleagues more frequently in the future" and "I will try to share my knowledge with my colleagues in a more effective way". Some authors adopted this instrument to measure knowledge sharing intentions (eg. Abdillah  from strongly disagree to strongly agree. A sample item is "I intend to share my work experience or knowhow from work with other organizational members more frequently in the future." Later, these items are also adopted by authors such as Cai et al., (2020) to measure the knowledge sharing intentions. After making a comparison, a four-item knowledge sharing intention questionnaire was adopted for this study. Regarding subjective norm measures, Lin and Lee (2004) used six items related to knowledge sharing. The items are rated on ve points Likert scale ranged from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Examples of items include "Institution encourages employees to share their knowledge with colleagues" (Abdillah et al., 2018). Moreno et al., (2020) used a four-item questionnaire to measure subjective group norm. A sample item includes "My coworker's exchange information and tips that are useful to improve their job performance." Therefore, I adopted these items to measure subjective norms in an organization. Earlier, the effectiveness of leaders is determined based on examining the consequences of a leader's action, measuring the attitudes of followers in the direction of the leader, and studying leader behaviors (Madanchian et al, 2017). For this study, a four-item questionnaire from Bass and Avolio (1990), cited in Lacerda & Veríssimo, (2015) is adopted and modi ed since the respondents are the leaders. These items are measured on ve points Likert scale. A sample item is "My leadership is effective in meeting jobrelated needs."

Data processing and analysis
Data were processed before the analysis was made. Accordingly, the collected data were organized to create order and sensible structure. Later, key themes for data analysis were generated based on the collected data. Finally, the data were coded and carefully connected to the theoretical propositions and entered into the SPSS software. After data processing is completed, data analysis was undertaken. The analysis technique that was employed in this study to test the hypotheses were ordinary least square regression analysis and hierarchical regression analysis. Before running the analysis the validity and reliability tests have been undertaken. First, the questionnaire was checked by two independent professionals on the subject matter and a sample of 15 questionnaires was sent for pilot studies. Next, a reliability test was undertaken using Cronbach's alpha. The collinearity tests were also undertaken and found that the highest VIF is 4.56, which shows collinearity is not a concern. 4. Results The R 2 value in the direct relationship between organizational norms and leadership effectiveness .607 revealed that the leadership effectiveness is explained by the organizational norms about 60.7%, while the R 2 in path 3 revealed that leadership effectiveness is explained by organizational subjective norms and leader's innovative behavior about 70.6% (Table 1). Table 1 also revealed that organizational norms have a signi cant impact on the effectiveness of leadership (β = .152, p = .000). Therefore, the rst hypothesis that claimed organizational subjective norms positively in uences leadership effectiveness is supported. There is also a signi cant in uence of organizational norms on a leader's innovative behavior.

The mediating role of leaders innovative behavior
Regarding the mediating role, a leader's innovative behavior positively mediates the relationship between organizational norms and leadership effectiveness. This result also proved that there is an indirect effect of organizational norms on leadership effectiveness that supported hypothesis 2. That is organizational norms indirectly affect leadership effectiveness through a leader's innovative behavior.

The moderating role of knowledge sharing intentions
The value of R2 indicates that when organizational norms are considered as an independent variable alone, leadership effectiveness is explained by about 55.5% by organizational norms. Later, when the moderators are added as an independent variable it increased to 61%, while the inclusion of the interaction variable is increased to 62.3%. Both organizational norms and knowledge sharing intention signi cantly in uence leadership effectiveness independently (Model 1). Similarly, in Model 2 the organizational norms (β = .803, p = .000) and knowledge sharing intentions (β = .299, p = .000) signi cantly positively in uences the leadership effectiveness. Finally, in the third model, the interaction of organizational norms and knowledge sharing intentions (β = .115, p = .062) positively signi cantly in uences leadership effectiveness.

The moderating role of Autonomous
The R 2 value .624 in model 1 (of the relationship between innovative behavior and leadership effectiveness) is increased to .731 in model 3. That is the leadership effectiveness is explained 73.1% by innovative behavior, leadership autonomy, and their interaction.

Discussions
The direct impact of organizational subjective norms on leadership effectiveness is signi cant. The study nds that knowledge sharing intention intensi es the in uence of organizational norms on a leader's innovative behavior. That is, as the leaders intend to share knowledge with employees, the organizational norms become improved and makes the leaders develop innovative behavior more. This is because the effect of personal attitude, subjective norm, and perceived behavioral control on knowledgesharing behavior is indirectly in uenced by knowledge-sharing intention (Abdillah et al., 2018), which further affects the leader's innovative behavior. Besides, subjective norms were signi cantly related to personal inclinations to share knowledge (Roth, 2016 (Tang, 2017). In this regard, the leader's intention to share knowledge builds a strong organizational norm. This makes organizational norms in uence more leadership effectiveness. More speci cally, when leaders tend to share knowledge, they build a strong sense of organizational norms from the free ow of information that improves the effectiveness of leaders.
The nding of this study also supported the hypothesis that says the more the leaders are autonomous, the more the leader's innovative behavior in uences the leadership effectiveness. Concerning this, there are related ndings that stated that a high level of job autonomy broadens employees' choices and renders them more responsible for their work, it can motivate greater innovative work behavior (Cai et al., 2018). Similarly, employees who have a low degree of autonomy may gain a low level of psychological satisfaction that constrain individuals' willingness to engage in desirable innovative behavior (Cai et al., 2018). That is, the leader's autonomy intensi es the leaders to be more innovative, which further strengthens the leader's effectiveness. This is because, when leaders are autonomous and more responsible to make decisions, they tend to develop more innovative behavior that can make the leaders more effective. That means, the entrepreneurial behavior (eg., innovative behavior) with exibility contributes more to leadership effectiveness.

Conclusions
Leadership effectiveness is an outcome of many factors related to the intentions, behavior, and practices of leaders, employees, and the overall organization. The ndings of this study state that the strength of organizational norms leads to effective leadership. That means as the norms such as exchanging of information, developing different approaches to solving problems, and the use of new knowledge and skills in the organization is supporting the leadership to be effective. Similarly, organizational norms in uence leadership effectiveness indirectly through a leader's innovative behavior. Organizational norms also have a direct impact on the leader's innovative behavior. This relationship is intensi ed when the leader is intended to share knowledge more. Moreover, the presence of high autonomy among leaders leads to the development of innovative behavior among those leaders. This development of innovative behavior further improves the effectiveness of leaders.

Theoretical Implication
Depends on the results of this study the following implications are forwarded to future researchers. This study examines the impact of organizational norms on leadership effectiveness from the perspectives of a leader's innovative behavior, knowledge sharing intentions, and autonomy. However, most of these tests captured the relationship from the perspectives of leaders. Therefore, I suggest to the future researchers to compare and contrast the above relationship among the leaders and employees. Besides innovativeness and autonomy, there is a necessity to test the role of other entrepreneurial variables such as risk-taking and proactiveness concerning leadership effectiveness. In this study, the mediating role of a leader's innovative behavior on leadership effectiveness is tested. However, there is also a necessity to test the mediating role of leader's autonomy and knowledge sharing intention in this relationship. Therefore, future researchers should consider all these relationships. Methodologically, this study's data collection is cross-sectional. However, it has paramount importance if the change in intentions and behaviors are tested in longitudinal studies. Therefore, future researchers should try to use longitudinal studies to test the changes in intentions and behaviors.

Declarations
Availability of data and material Data's collected using questionnaire was available

Competing interests
The author declared that there is no competing interests.

Funding information
There are no funds received for this study

Authors' contributions
Both authors collected the data, performed the statistical analysis, and drafted and approved the nal manuscript.