Purpose This study aims to investigate the relationship between empowering leadership and employee creativity and the mediating roles of work engagement and knowledge sharing in this relationship. Design/methodology/approach Using the results of a survey of 302 knowledge workers from a leading telecommunications company in South Korea, the relationships among the variables empowering leadership, work engagement and knowledge sharing on employee creativity were analyzed using conducted confirmatory factor analysis and structural equation modeling. This study conducted bootstrap analyses to test the mediating effects. Findings Empowering leadership was positively and significantly associated with work engagement and knowledge sharing. Work engagement was significantly related to knowledge sharing and employee creativity. In turn, knowledge sharing was significantly associated with employee creativity. The direct effect of empowering leadership on employee creativity was nonsignificant, but this study found a significant indirect effect of empowering leadership on employee creativity via the significant mediating roles of work engagement and knowledge sharing. Originality/value This study introduced empowering leadership that may work for knowledge workers who create new ideas by analyzing data from the knowledge workers’ perceptions of their leaders in the workplace. The intuitive linkage between work engagement and knowledge sharing was empirically verified in this study. This study’s findings and implications provide direction for knowledge workers and how their managers should support employees’ work environment and activities.

A topic model was explored using unsupervised machine learning to summarized free-text narrative reports of 77,215 injuries that occurred in coal mines in the USA between 2000 and 2015. Latent Dirichlet Allocation modeling processes identified six topics from the free-text data. One topic, a theme describing primarily injury incidents resulting in strains and sprains of musculoskeletal systems, revealed differences in topic emphasis by the location of the mine property at which injuries occurred, the degree of injury, and the year of injury occurrence. Text narratives clustered around this topic refer most frequently to surface or other locations rather than underground locations that resulted in disability and that, also, increased secularly over time. The modeling success enjoyed in this exploratory effort suggests that additional topic mining of these injury text narratives is justified, especially using a broad set of covariates to explain variations in topic emphasis and for comparison of surface mining injuries with injuries occurring during site preparation for construction.

We explored the perceptions of individuals in teams (both leaders and members) regarding shared leadership in the South Korean business context, seeking a nuanced and unique understanding of shared leadership. We examined how shared leadership in team‐based structures develops and functions. Informed by the driving and restraining forces framework, we elucidate factors that facilitate and that impede shared leadership practice and implementation. The analysis uses semi‐structured interviews with seven teams that each consist of one team leader and two team members. Findings include the four essential elements of shared leadership and the identification of the driving and restraining forces for why employees and managers welcome or refuse to accept shared leadership. We present strategies for human resource development (HRD) professionals seeking to cultivate shared leadership in the South Korean context. We also discuss the study's limitations and potential directions of inquiry for future researchers.

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