Management strategies to mitigate knowledge hiding behaviours: symmetric and asymmetric analyses

Abstract

ABSTRACT The study investigates the impact of management strategies (reducing chain of command, developing informal interaction, implementing incentive policy, easy performance appraisal, encouraging higher interdependency, and open space workstations) to mitigate the knowledge-hiding behaviours while using the psychological contract as a mediator between management strategies and knowledge-hiding behaviours. Symmetric (PLS-SEM) and asymmetric (fsQCA) methods are used to analyse time lag data collected from 457 employees of software houses. Except for the reducing chain of command, the PLS-SEM results show that all management strategies and psychological contract have a significant role in reducing knowledge-hiding behaviours. The fsQCA results suggest that all management strategies and psychological contract play their role in different causal recipes while influencing the knowledge-hiding behaviours, however, developing informal interaction, implementing incentive policy, easy performance appraisal, and psychological contracts have more consistent contributions in these causal recipes.