Understanding knowledge hiding in organizations

• Author: Matej Černe,Catherine E. Connelly,Anders Dysvik,Miha Škerlavaj
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2407
• Published date: 01 September 2019
• Date: 01 September 2019

SPECIAL ISSUE ARTICLE

Understanding knowledge hiding in organizations

Catherine E. Connelly

1

|Matej Černe

2

|Anders Dysvik

3

|Miha Škerlavaj

2,3

1

DeGroote School of Business, McMaster

University, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada

2

School of Economics and Business, University

of Ljubljana, Ljubljana, Slovenia

3

Department of Leadership and Organizational

Behavior, BI Norwegian Business School, Oslo,

Norway

Correspondence

Catherine E. Connelly, DeGroote School of

Business, McMaster University, Hamilton,

Ontario L8S 4M4, Canada.

Email: connell@mcmaster.ca

Summary

In our introduction to this special issue on understanding knowledge hiding in organi-

zations, we provide some context to how and why this phenomenon should be studied.

We then describe the five articles that comprise the special issue, and we note some

common themes and divergences in this collection. Our introduction concludes with

some suggestions for future research on knowledge hiding in organizations.

KEYWORDS

counterproductive workplace behaviors, knowledge hiding, knowledge management, knowledge

sharing

1|INTRODUCTION

Many managers expect their employees to share their knowledge freely

with each other, in order for the organization to work more efficiently

and effectively. However, organizations do not “own”the intellectual

assets of employees (Kelloway & Barling, 2000), and many employees

prefer to keep their knowledge to themselves. The decision to hide

knowledge may be taken quickly, but it is not without consequence,

and it behooves us to understand this phenomenon in more detail.

Knowledge hiding is defined as “an intentional attempt by an indi-

vidual to withhold or conceal knowledge that has been requested by

another person”(Connelly, Zweig, Webster, & Trougakos, 2012, p.

65). Since the establishment of the construct of knowledge hiding in

2012, much research has investigated the antecedents and conse-

quences of this behavior. Knowledge hiding has serious implications

for organizations, relationships, and individuals. It has been linked to

outcomes such as reduced levels of creativity (Bogilović,Černe, &

Škerlavaj, 2017; Černe, Nerstad, Dysvik, & Škerlavaj, 2014; Rhee &

Choi, 2017) and innovative work behavior (Černe, Hernaus, Dysvik,

&Škerlavaj, 2017), as well as decreased individual performance

(Wang, Han, Xiang, & Hampson, 2018). Knowledge hiding has also

been linked to greater interpersonal distrust (Connelly et al., 2012)

and a deterioration of interpersonal relationships (Connelly & Zweig,

2015). There is also evidence that knowledge hiding can spread from

supervisors to followers (Arain, Bhatti, Ashraf, & Fang, 2018).

The antecedents of knowledge hiding have also been the subject of

recent research. Knowledge hiding has been shown to increase in con-

texts of high distrust and competitiveness (Hernaus, Černe, Connelly,

Pološki Vokić,&Škerlavaj, 2018) or perceived organizational politics

(Malik et al., 2019). Conversely, knowledge hiding is reduced in situa-

tions where reciprocal social exchange is present or in contexts where

a mastery climate is prevalent (Černe et al., 2014), or when individuals

have high levels of proving goal orientation (Rhee & Choi, 2017) or

prosocial motivation (Škerlavaj,Connelly, Černe, & Dysvik, 2018). There

may also be an association between dark triad psychological traits (e.g.,

Machiavellianism) and knowledge hiding (Pan, Zhang, Teo, & Lim, 2018).

Context has also been shown to play a key role, in terms of both

the job or work environment and the characteristics of the individual.

For example, task interdependence in teams has been shown to miti-

gate the negative association between knowledge hiding and team

creativity (Fong, Men, Luo, & Jia, 2018), and job‐based psychological

ownership has been suggested to predict knowledge hiding, in the

presence of high avoidance motivation (Wang, Law, Zhang, Li, &Liang,

2019). There is evidence that prosocial motivation and cultural values

interact to predict knowledge hiding (Babič,Černe, Škerlavaj, & Zhang,

2018), and knowledge hiding may be affected by subjective norms

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This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided

the original work is properly cited.

© 2019 The Authors. Journal of Organizational Behavior Published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd

Received: 27 May 2019 Accepted: 7 July 2019

DOI: 10.1002/job.2407

J Organ Behav. 2019;40:779–782. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job 779