Knowledge management behavior and individual creativity: Goal orientations as antecedents and in‐group social status as moderating contingency

• Published date: 01 July 2017
• Date: 01 July 2017
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2168
• Author: Young Won Rhee,Jin Nam Choi

Knowledge management behavior and individual

creativity: Goal orientations as antecedents and

in-group social status as moderating contingency

YOUNG WON RHEE AND JIN NAM CHOI*

Graduate School of Business, Seoul National University, Seoul, South Korea

Summary Creativity is an increasingly important domain of performance largely based on knowledge held and

exchanged among employees. Despite the necessity of knowledge exchange, individual employees tend

to experience mixed motivation caused by the inherent social dilemma of knowledge sharing. To

pragmatically explain how individuals deal with this motivational dilemma, we propose an expanded

framework of knowledge management behavior (KMB) that includes knowledge sharing, hiding, and

manipulation. Individual choices among these KMBs may be driven by dispositional goal orientations.

We also propose that the effects of KMB on creativity of employees vary depending on their social status

in a work group. Our analyses based on 214 employees from 37 teams reveal that (i) learning goal

orientation increases knowledge sharing and decreases knowledge manipulation; (ii) avoiding goal orien-

tation increases knowledge sharing and manipulation; and (iii) proving goal orientation increases

knowledge hiding and manipulation. Knowledge hiding is negatively related to employee creativity,

particularly for employees with high social status. Knowledge manipulation is positively related to

creativity, particularly for those with high social status. This study develops and validates a theoretical

framework explaining the formative process and distinct outcomes of the multifaceted and strategic

approaches to KMB at the individual level. Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Keywords: knowledge sharing dilemma; knowledge hiding; knowledge manipulation; goal orientation;

social status; employee creativity

Generating novel and useful ideas through employee creativity is increasingly acknowledged as a core competence

for organizations to survive and prosper (Lin, 2007). Given its growing importance, scholars have examined various

personal and contextual antecedents of creativity (Shalley, Zhou, & Oldham, 2004). Among various factors,

knowledge exchange among employees has been consistently identified as a meaningful antecedent of creativity

observed at multiple levels of analysis, including individual employees (Gilson, Lim, Luciano, & Choi 2013), teams

(Mesmer-Magnus & DeChurch, 2009; Sung & Choi, 2012), and entire organizations (Darroch, 2005). Knowledge is

the fundamental raw material for creativity that enables the recombination, restructuring, and heuristic search for

new knowledge and information (Ohlsson, 2011). Accordingly, through unconstrained knowledge exchange,

employees may effectively pool and utilize knowledge distributed across individuals and work units, thereby

promoting the identification of creative solutions (Hansen, 2002).

Despite the known benefits of knowledge exchange, employees may refuse to share their knowledge because of

knowledge sharing dilemma. This social dilemma represents an arising motivational tension among employees

because once knowledge is shared, it becomes public goods that can be accessed and used freely by others including

competitors (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2002). This social and motivational dilemma elicits a mixed motivation or

misalignment between personal and collective interests (Kimmerle, Wodzicki, Jarodzka, & Cress, 2011). Individuals

who share knowledge contribute to the public knowledge repository necessary for collective performance but can no

*Correspondence to: Jin Nam Choi, Graduate School of Business, Seoul National University, 1 Gwanak-ro, Gwanak-gu, Seoul 151-916, South

Korea. E-mail: jnchoi@snu.kr

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.

Received 17 April 2015

Revised 21 October 2016, Accepted 16 November 2016

Journal of Organizational Behavior, J. Organiz. Behav. 38, 813–832 (2017)

Published online 14 December 2016 in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com) DOI: 10.1002/job.2168

Research Article

longer claim the exclusive value of their privately held knowledge and know-how, which usually constitute the

reason for their employment and status in their organization (Cabrera & Cabrera, 2002; Mudambi & Navarra,

2004). Amid the tension between self-interest and collective interest, employees may resort to different strategies

to handle their knowledge. Unfortunately, the literature is disorganized and fails to explain cohesively how

employees strategically manage their knowledge to mitigate motivational dilemma (Černe, Nerstad, Dysvik, &

Škerlavaj, 2014). To address this issue, the present research contributes to the literature by theorizing an integrated

framework of how employees resolve their knowledge-specific dilemma through engagement in a certain strategic

behavior to manage their knowledge.

To explain individuals’tactical choices involving knowledge, separate streams of literature have been developed

around several distinct behaviors, namely, knowledge sharing, knowledge hiding, and knowledge manipulation

(Bettis-Outland, 1999; Černe et al., 2014; Steinel, Utz, & Koning, 2010; Wang & Noe, 2010). Phenomenologically,

each behavior represents different solutions for knowledge sharing dilemma. Based on the consensus framework,

knowledge sharing presents how employees behave functionally in congruence with team and organizational goals

(Schultze & Stabell, 2004). By contrast, knowledge hiding and knowledge manipulation illustrate how employees

can manage their knowledge based on self-interest and political needs, which are consistent with the dissensus

theory of knowledge management (Schultze & Stabell, 2004). Integrating the fragmented streams of research and

generating a unified theoretical framework is critical because multifaceted consideration of various knowledge-

handling strategies can provide a comprehensive and realistic explanation of individual efforts to resolve the mixed

motivation situation. Considering the increasing importance of organizational creativity and knowledge exchange as

a critical venue toward creativity, further elaboration of knowledge-related dynamics at the individual level is

significant for both organizational researchers and practitioners.

To specify the motivational underpinnings of the multidimensional approach to knowledge management behavior

(KMB), we focus on employee goal orientation, which comprises critical motivational disposition guiding

behavioral choices in achievement situations (Dweck, 2000). As a dispositional antecedent of workplace behavior,

goal orientations are demonstrated to be a significant predictor of an interpersonal behavior such as information

sharing (Poortvliet, Janssen, & Van de Vliert, 2007). In the present study, we extend previous discussions and

propose that goal orientations are critical antecedents to different KMBs because they affect how individuals

approach and interpret knowledge sharing dilemma. In doing so, this study contributes to the literature by presenting

a plausible explanation of the relationship between goal orientations and creativity, extending previous findings of

the link between goal orientations and knowledge exchange (Poortvliet et al., 2007), and those involving the

relationship between goal orientations and creativity (Hirst, Van Knippenberg, & Zhou, 2009). The present study

contributes to the literature by proposing goal orientations as distinct motivational antecedents to different KMBs

and offering an integrated theory that combines goal orientation, knowledge management, and creativity at the

individual level.

We also investigate the distinct effects of the three KMBs on individual creativity. Contrasting the consistent

positive effects of collective knowledge exchange on organizational, team, and individual creativity (Gong, Kim,

Zhu, & Lee, 2013; Mesmer-Magnus & DeChurch, 2009; Van Wijk, Jansen, & Lyles, 2008; Sung & Choi, 2012),

the implication of individual knowledge exchange toward individual creativity has been controversial with mixed em-

pirical findings (Flynn, 2003; Kane, Argote, & Levine, 2005; Haas & Hansen, 2005). We argue that such ambiguity is

partly because of the neglect of distinguishing different knowledge-handling behaviors that may lead to varying cre-

ative outcomes. By specifying distinct KMBs and drawing on the social exchange theory (Cropanzano & Mitchell,

2005), the present study offers a fine-grained understanding of the way KMBs affect creativity at the individual level.

Finally, we isolate social status as a boundary condition such that the effects of KMBs on individual creativity

may take different forms depending on social status because KMBs reflect social exchanges shaped by social status

among actors. Social exchanges based on KMBs affect creativity by promoting mutual intellectual stimulation and

expanding the knowledge pool for participating actors (Perry-Smith, 2006). In this context, social status is a critical

relational characteristic that governs the emergence and form of social exchange relationships (Lawler & Thye,

1999). Social status is ascribed to an individual who can contribute to team or organizational goal achievement

814 Y. W. RHEE AND J. N. CHOI

Copyright © 2016 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. J. Organiz. Behav. 38, 813–832 (2017)

DOI: 10.1002/job