Creating a Culture to Avoid Knowledge Hiding Within an Organization: The Role of Management Support

Abstract

Knowledge hiding is known to have negative consequences on organizational performance. The existing literature mainly focuses on the identification of antecedents and consequences of knowledge hiding. The studies pertaining to the top management role in creating a culture that stops concealing knowledge within an organization are limited. To fill that gap, the paper empirically address the knowledge sharing culture and to explore the management support to avoid knowledge hiding culture in an organization. This study based on an empirical study carried out in a United Kingdom-based laboratory within a high-tech global corporation, in which the atmosphere appeared conducive to knowledge sharing, and knowledge transfer appeared voluntary and spontaneous. The paper seeks to address why members of the case organization is reluctant about knowledge hiding among themselves. The study reveals that the management role is important in creating a culture that help discourage employees to withhold knowledge. The paper identifies the actions that top management takes to stop concealing knowledge within an organization. This study has provided several contributions. The findings of the study may be useful to managers and practitioners. For managers, this paper presents some important organizational factors that can be nurtured to avoid a knowledge-hiding culture in the organization. They can also take the management actions of the case organization as lessons to create a culture that encourage their employees to avoid knowledge hiding behavior.

Does small and medium enterprise differential leadership increase subordinate knowledge hiding? Evidences from job insecurity, territorial consciousness and leadership performance expectation

“…Through a systematic literature review and analysis, this research finds that, although some studies explore antecedents of knowledge hiding from individual-level element perspectives, such as personality traits (Anand and Jain, 2014;Demirkasimoglu, 2016), and psychological characteristics (Ain et al, 2021;Tian et al, 2021), these existing studies scarcely explores knowledge hiding from the view of higher-up management features. The most recent literature has continuously explore knowledge hiding in relation to contemporary leadership phenomena, occurring frequently in the current era of "post-COVID-19" (Batistic and Poell, 2022), such as insufficient resources available for allocation (Corwin et al, 2022) or clubbing together in workplace (Jasimuddin and Saci, 2022). Although existing theoretical books, reviews, and papers have widely examined and highlighted the impacts of various types of SME leadership on a series of subordinate behaviors, most, to our knowledge, have largely ignored the differential category of SME leaders and have seldom observed or analyzed the influence mechanisms of this leadership category, especially specific influences on 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.983669 individual knowledge-based actions.…”

“…Moreover, some scholars on individual knowledge management have called for more study on the impacts from the "leadership side" on knowledge owners' interactive behaviors, that is, how knowledge owners construct relations with their superiors (Abdullah et al, 2019;Jasimuddin and Saci, 2022). Individual knowledge-based behaviors involve not only information sharing processes but also hiding ones (Ma et al, 2013).…”

“…We selected and controlled for SME subordinates' basic demographic characteristics, which have been widely as controls in related literatures (Li et al, 2019). Prior literature has suggested that gender, age, job category, highest education and tenure may affect subordinates' knowledge hiding (Abdullah et al, 2019;Banagou et al, 2021;Donate et al, 2022;Jasimuddin and Saci, 2022). The researchers have claimed that the aforementioned controls interfere with the interpretive force of the proposed theoretical model.…”

From NGOs with Knowledge: An Empirical Study on the Impact of Trust-Antecedents on Knowledge Transfer

“…Trust has an influence on knowledge transfer (Jasimuddin & Saci, 2022). Mayer et al (1995) find three trustantecedents: capability, benevolence, and integrity.…”

“…The transfer of Knowledge is an important part of the knowledge management process (Jasimuddin & Saci, 2022;Zhang & Jasimuddin, 2015). Organizations have paid close attention to knowledge transfer.…”