Innovational leadership is a set of practices and skills that leaders develop to promote innovative behaviors in their workers at the individual and collective levels. This concept is novel and focuses on one role of leaders: facilitating the generation of new or significantly improved products and services. The foundation of any high-performing organization is the innovative behavior of its workers. Leaders influence organizational learning, knowledge sharing, and employees’ innovative behavior. The innovative leader possesses traits related to creativity, thoughts, and cognition, engaging innovative behavior, and generating and implementing ideas. Top management knowledge value improves knowledge sharing between employees. Knowledge-sharing practices are all activities intended to improve the internal flow and use of knowledge in an organization. The ability of leaders to establish a sense of self-worth and self-respect in workers is a vital determinant of tacit knowledge sharing. Self-efficacy is an individual´s confidence in his or her abilities to execute a particular task. Self-efficacy influences how people think, feel, and act and, therefore, their achievements. If an individual believes it is impossible to produce results, then he or she will not act to make an event happen.

This research aims to evaluate the impact of this kind of leadership on tacit and explicit knowledge. In addition, the role of self-efficacy as a mediator variable and sex as a moderator variable are studied. The sample consisted of 415 workers from different sectors in Colombia. According to the results, innovational leadership positively influenced tacit and explicit knowledge, although the effect on tacit knowledge was higher than on explicit. Self-efficacy was a mediator in the relationship between innovational leadership and knowledge sharing. No moderator effect of sex was found between innovational leadership and knowledge sharing. This is the first time that a new approach to leadership, innovational, is studied concerning knowledge sharing. This is also original the evaluation of the impact of this kind of leadership on tacit and explicit knowledge sharing. It is also stated that gender could be more relevant than sex to study the relationship between leadership and knowledge sharing. The concept of innovational leadership is new; therefore, the scope of the presented results is exploratory.

Keywords: Innovational leadership, knowledge sharing, knowledge management, self-efficacy.