Consequences of Supervisor Knowledge Hiding in Organizations: A Multilevel Mediation Analysis

Abstract

Drawing on the theoretical framework of social cognitive theory, our study explores the multilevel mediation model in which moral disengagement (level‐1) mediates the direct relationships between knowledge hiding by supervisors from subordinates (KHSS: level‐2) and supervisor directed organizational citizenship behavior (SOCB: level‐1) and supervisor directed silence (SS: level‐1). Drawing on multi‐sourced, multi‐timed, and multilevel data of 306 subordinates nested within 83 supervisors, multilevel structural equation modeling (ML‐SEM) was used to test the proposed model. The results demonstrate that KHSS, first, fosters subordinates’ moral disengagement, which in turn reduces their SOCB and enhances their SS. Our findings offer several useful theoretical and managerial implications of the negative consequences of supervisor knowledge hiding in organizations. As one of the first studies to provide empirical evidence for the existence of supervisor knowledge hiding (i.e. KHSS), this research highlights the consequences of KHSS on subordinates’ moral disengagement, SOCB, and SS.

Knowledge Hiding: Current Research Status and Future Research Directions

“…In terms of individual-level results, the existing research has examined the effects of knowledge hiding on individual job performance, psychological status and attitude, workplace behavior, and supervisor-subordinate/coworker relationships. For instance, most studies have found that knowledge hiding among colleagues and between supervisors and subordinates can reduce task performance, organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), and creativity (Connelly et al, 2012;Cerne et al, 2014;Arain et al, 2019Arain et al, , 2020aJahanzeb et al, 2019;Malik et al, 2019;Singh, 2019;Zhu et al, 2019).…”

“…In addition, both evasive hiding and rationalized hiding will hinder innovation performance. Regarding psychological status and attitudes, research suggests that knowledge hiding increases employees' moral disengagement (Arain et al, 2020a) and decreases their psychological safety, well-being, job satisfaction, and sense of thriving (Jiang et al, 2019;Offergelt et al, 2019;Khoreva and Wechtler, 2020). Furthermore, knowledge hiding can trigger knowledge seekers' deviant behaviors, turnover intention, upward silence, and non-engagement in knowledge sharing (Connelly and Zweig, 2015;Offergelt et al, 2019;Singh, 2019;Arain et al, 2020a).…”

“…Arain et al (2020b) point out that supervisor knowledge hiding negatively influences subordinates' OCB toward their supervisors, and subordinate distrust in their supervisors plays a mediating role. Supervisor knowledge hiding can also activate employee moral disengagement, prompting them to reduce OCB toward their supervisors and increase silence behaviors (Arain et al, 2020a). Jiang et al (2019) suggest that knowledge hiding makes the hiders feel the insecurity of self-expression and interpersonal risk, thereby reducing their psychological safety and endangering their ability to thrive at work.…”

Towards Explaining Knowledge Hiding through Relationship Conflict, Frustration, and Irritability: The Case of Public Sector Teaching Hospitals

“…Previous studies have sought to develop a research model that integrates motivational characteristics [16,23], the big five personality types [12], and leadership styles that influence knowledge hiding [24]. We assume that one of the major causes of knowledge hiding is relationship conflict, which creates aggressiveness in the personality and eventually leads to knowledge hiding.…”

The Psychology behind Knowledge Hiding in an Organization

“…KH takes place among coworkers (Aljawarneh and Atan 2018), team members (Babic et al 2019;Singh 2019), and even between supervisors and subordinates (Butt 2019) for various reasons (Afshar-Jalili et al 2020). Studies have found that KH is not only a hindrance to knowledge sharing (Qureshi and Evans 2015;Liu et al 2020a) but is also detrimental to organizations, as it can affect a firm's decision-making quality (Ghasemaghaei and Turel 2021), idea implementation (Li et al 2020), organizational performance, team performance (Chatterjee et al 2021), and creativity (Bogilovic et al 2017;Fong et al 2018;Peng et al 2019), in addition to employees' turnover intention (Serenko and Bontis 2016) and organizational citizenship behaviors (Arain et al 2020). KH also affects the internal and external stakeholders in an organization by affecting, for example, employees' abilities to solve customer problems, relationship building with customers (Chaker et al 2020), creativity (Rhee and Choi 2017), and job (Chatterjee et al 2021;Wang et al 2018b;Jahanzeb et al 2020) and innovation performance (Khoreva and Wechtler 2020).…”