Designing a Causal Model of The Relationship Between Leadership Styles & Knowledge Management of Employees & Information Technology Acceptance as a Mediator

Today, information technology (IT) as the axis of the formation of information societies has been considered by most countries in the world. Knowledge management and leadership role speed up the information exchange process. The purpose of study is to investigate the mediating role of information technology in relationship between leadership styles and employee knowledge management with a structural equation modeling approach. The research method is descriptive-correlational and it is done in field. The statistical population consisted of employees of the Departments of Sports and Youth of Northwestern Iran. In order to perform sampling, due to the existence of 3 provinces, the relative stratified random method was used. Based on number of items and variables, minimum sample size of 365 people was considered.Three questionnaires of leadership style of Bass and Olivo (2003), knowledge management of Filius et al. (2000) and IT of Nickpey et al. (2019) consisted research instruments. To evaluate content validity of the questionnaires, sports management professors and experts and to evaluate reliability, Cronbach's alpha coefficient was used. SPSS 23 software was used to analyze descriptive statistics and correlation coefficients, and AMOS24 software was used to evaluate data fit and model evaluation, including convergent validity, diagnostic validity and composite reliability. SMART-PLS3 software was used to provide a model.Rresults showed that in relationship between leadership styles and knowledge management, IT acceptance acts as a role of mediator. Therefore, it is suggested that the information technology acceptance process of the employees be based on knowledge management and leadership styles.