How Peer Abusive Supervision Affects Sales Employees’ Customer Knowledge Hiding: The Roles of Rivalry and Schadenfreude

Abstract

This study aims to examine the impacts of peer abusive supervision, perceived rivalry and schadenfreude over the abused peers on sales employees' customer knowledge hiding. Methods: We conducted multiple regression analyses of 283 sales employees' responses from two Chinese and two South Korean electronic device companies to test the hypotheses, which constitute a theoretical framework. Results: Our empirical results confirmed the positive impact of peer abusive supervision on sales employees' customer knowledge hiding, with the relationship moderated by rivalry and schadenfreude; moreover, rivalry and schadenfreude jointly exert the greatest impacts on the main effect. Conclusion:This study sheds light on the knowledge hiding literature, with theoretical implications for the research regarding the spillover effect of abusive supervision, rivalry, schadenfreude, customer knowledge sharing, and managerial practices about the management of customer knowledge among sales employees.

Exploring the Underlying Mechanism Between Perceived Injustice and Knowledge Hiding: An Empirical Investigation

“…In organizational contexts, the perceptions of injustice are very much visible and possess many detrimental outcomes. Recent studies determined certain elements that evoke employees’ KH behaviors when they perceive some sort of injustice such as role conflict, 5 workplace bullying, 122 and abusive supervision 40 . Secondly, this study fairly revealed the mediating role of employees’ SSB in the PIJ-KH relationship.…”

“…Recent studies proposed that both personal and situational factors are important 40 and should be given due attention as it determines employees’ behaviors about unfair treatment, 41 injustice 42 and KH. 43 Thus, responding to such needs and recent calls in the literature, we contend that PIJ may have a potential in affecting individuals’ intentions to hide knowledge.…”

Exploring the underlying mechanism between fear of losing power and knowledge hiding

“…Nevertheless, organizations are dependent on the intellectual assets of its employees ( Kelloway and Barling, 2000 ), and several employees prefer not to share knowledge with others. Though employees have certain reasons of hiding knowledge at the workplace for example, workplace incivility and cynicism ( Anand et al, 2022 ), interpersonal injustice ( Cao, 2022 ), workplace bullying ( Islam and Chaudhary, 2022 ), and peer abusive supervision ( Ma et al, 2022 ) but KH also has some devastating consequences on both individuals and organizations ( Serenko and Bontis, 2016 ; Ellmer and Reichel, 2021 ; Nguyen et al, 2022 ). For instance, KH decreases creativity ( Černe et al, 2014 ; Bari et al, 2019 ), kills innovative work behavior ( Černe et al, 2017 ; Mubarak et al, 2022 ), and reduces employee performance ( Anand and Hassan, 2019 ).…”