Managing intellectuals: Reaping the most and the best of knowledge workers in the post-COVID world

Arzu Atan () and Tarik Atan
Additional contact information
Arzu Atan: World Peace University, Nicosia
Tarik Atan: Cyprus International University

E&M Economics and Management, 2023, vol. 26, issue 4, 38-50

Abstract: The COVID-19 crisis forced massive changes in work practices, channeling most of the activities to digital/remote work paradigms almost overnight. In this post-COVID locked-in world, traditional top-down control and command mechanisms simply ceased to exist. Profoundly different approaches and understandings became necessary to reap the most and the best outcomes from workers. In this new paradigm, cultivating organisational citizenship behaviors might be the most – if not only – viable way to ensure comprehensive results and sustained success. That necessitates a highly rooted insight into the influences of leadership styles. This article discusses the constructs of transactional leadership and transformational leadership styles. Contextualisation of the data patterns investigates the interrelationships between these two styles by comparing and contradicting their effects on organisational citizenship behaviors. It explains how these two approaches work in tandem for better results, mutually enabling each other, like the two legs of an athlete, where the lack of one profoundly cripples the outcomes, making the other ineffective as well. Using a survey inquiring about the perceptions of online knowledge workers, a three-step analysis was conducted and, as a result, established a robust argument that these two leadership styles are not paradoxical; they need not be mutually exclusive or contradicting can enable and complement each other. This finding is crucial for managing knowledge workers and knowledge workers as managers.

Keywords: Management; organisational citizenship behaviors; transformational leadership; transactional leadership; knowledge workers; complementary (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D23 D89 J29 M12 M19 M54 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.15240/tul/001/2023-4-003

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:bbl:journl:v:26:y:2023:i:4:p:38-50

DOI: 10.15240/tul/001/2023-4-003

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in E&M Economics and Management from Technical University of Liberec, Faculty of Economics Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Vendula Pospisilova ().