Examination of knowledge hiding with conflict, competition and personal values

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper was to examine knowledge hiding behaviours with perceived conflict types, competition and personal values of employees. Design/methodology/approach Two studies were carried out and structural equation modelling and moderated regression analyses were conducted to test the hypotheses. Findings Study I, with employees from software development companies, revealed that task conflict and relationship conflict have additive effect on knowledge hiding behaviour. Additionally, task conflict is positively related to employees’ perceived competition. However, no mediation role of perceived competition was found between conflict types and knowledge hiding. Study II, with employees from the banking sector, indicated that employees’ individualistic or collectivistic values play a moderating role between perceived task conflict and knowledge hiding behaviours. The negative effect of task conflict on knowledge hiding behaviour is higher if the individuals have individualistic personal values. Practical implications This study contributes to managers by offering some guidance on what can be the results of conflict and competition between employees and how employees’ personal values can affect conflict and knowledge hiding relation. Originality/value To the challenges of knowledge hiding behaviour outcomes for businesses, many managers should first consider the predictors of knowledge hiding and then find some solutions against the negative consequences. This study is one of the first to examine knowledge hiding with regard to conflict types, perceived competition between employees and personal values of employees.

Be smart, play dumb? A transactional perspective on day-specific knowledge hiding, interpersonal conflict, and psychological strain

“…Last but not least, we want to emphasize that our day-level results did not completely generalize to the person level, supporting the notion that day-level relationships do not simply mirror person-level relationships (see Gabriel et al, 2019;McCormick et al, 2020) and pointing to the usefulness of employing a diary approach to study knowledge hiding, its antecedents, and consequences. Specifically, while relationship conflict was positively related to playing dumb and evasive hiding also at the person level-replicating earlier findings (Semerci, 2019) on the predictive role of interpersonal conflict for knowledge hiding-playing dumb and evasive hiding were not significantly related to psychological strain responses at the between-person level. Yet, for evasive hiding the relationships even showed a positive trend.…”

“…In our study, though, we captured interpersonal conflict with one or more coworkers as well as knowledge hiding behaviors toward one or more coworkers. While recent studies on the social predictors of knowledge hiding used the same approach (e.g., Jahanzeb et al, 2019;Semerci, 2019), this way of how we measured conflict and knowledge hiding does not guarantee that conflict partners and knowledge hiding targets were the same persons. However, the social interactionist framework (Andersson and Pearson, 1999) and empirical findings indicate that employees do not only engage in direct retaliation toward conflict partners, but that experienced conflict might incite them to engage in a rather broad set of negative interpersonal behaviors toward a range of targets (e.g., Penney and Spector, 2005;Liu et al, 2015).…”

Antecedents of Knowledge Withholding: A Systematic Review & Integrative Framework

“…Distrust similarly led to knowledge hiding among 345 Canadian finance professionals, students, and an online panel (Connelly et al, 2012) and among 19 R&D professionals in a pharmaceutical company in India (Kumar Jha & Varkkey, 2018). Other negative experiences such as coworker opportunistic behaviors also increased knowledge hoarding (Anaza & Nowlin, 2017), as did the experience of negative interpersonal conflicts, which were studied among 560 respondents from software development and banking in Turkey (Boz Semerci, 2019). As another example, Serenko and Bontis (2016) collected data from 693 employees of the credit union in Canada and the United States on reciprocity “loops.” The authors find that a lack of reciprocity of one person could lead to knowledge hiding of another who, in turn, negatively reciprocates by also hiding.…”

Bridging the Breach: Using Positive Affectivity to Overcome Knowledge Hiding after Contract Breaches

“…In line with previous research on knowledge-hiding behavior(Semerci, 2019) and recommendations about structural equation modeling(Lattin, Carroll, & Green, 2003), we model this behavior as a first-order multi-item construct for the comparison of different structural equation models, as reported subsequently in Table3.…”