Collaborative synergy and leadership in e-business

Logically, it makes sense that organizations can be successful if their employees collaborate effectively, in a synergistic manner. Economically, e-businesses around the world leverage the Internet for efficient collaboration while in parallel many companies now use enterprise applications for process automation and knowledge sharing. From a human resource perspective, it is argued professionals must inspire and influence their e-business teams to virtually collaborate and synergize across physical organization boundaries using transformational leadership principles. Rationally, investors in e-business need proof that applying knowledge sharing and transformational leadership theories will facilitate team collaboration and synergy and therefore improve organizational performance. Empirically, this e-business industry study develops a statistically significant path model using multivariate linear regression (n=3995), revealing transformational leadership and knowledge sharing factors are mediated by a latent construct of collaborative synergy, which predicts project performance and stakeholder satisfaction. Rival theories are evaluated to stimulate future research.