ABSTRACT: This study is about the relationship between knowledge management on employee engagement and participative leadership as a mediation variable. This research uses a mixed method: firstly, doing interviews with informants such as managers or heads of departments in three different companies and analyzing the interview by using thematic analysis. After obtaining the result of the interview, the next step is to give questionnaires to employees in companies. The research model and hypotheses have been tested by partial least squares-structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM). The result in qualitative indicates that it’s widely accepted that knowledge management is a crucial organizational function. Emphasizing both explicit and tacit knowledge, the organization places a high priority on converting individual skills into shared assets in order to foster learning and operational efficiency across departments. This knowledge management practice can help employee engagement in companies and also, with the help of participative leadership, can make employees more comfortable doing their jobs. This result also confirms the result of a quantitative hypothesis that knowledge management positively affects employee engagement and also knowledge management positively affects participative leadership and also that participative leadership plays minor role in mediation of the relationship between knowledge management on employee engagement.

KEYWORDS –  knowledge management, knowledge sharing, knowledge management systems, employee engagement, participative leadership