Nonlinear effects of team abusive supervision on team members’ knowledge hiding

Abstract

Despite the necessity of knowledge exchange, the individual employees tend to hide their knowledge based on different, mixed or no motives. Drawing on the integration of balance theory and displaced aggression theory, we explained the role of leadership in influencing employee knowledge hiding. Specifically, we proposed a U-shaped relationship between team abusive supervision and member knowledge hiding in teams. Moreover, we proposed that economic and social leader-member exchange moderate the relationship between team abusive supervision and employee knowledge hiding. Our analysis based on 260 employees nested in 63 groups revealed that team abusive supervision and employee knowledge hiding indeed have a U-shaped relationship such that the moderate level of team abusive supervision triggers the minimum level of employee knowledge hiding. Economic LMX moderates the team abusive supervision-knowledge hiding relationship such that team abusive supervision will associate with less employee knowledge hiding when team has high level rather than low level of economic LMX. Moreover, social LMX moderates the team abusive supervisor-knowledge hiding relationship such that team abusive supervision will relate to more employee knowledge hiding when team has high level rather than low level of social LMX. The implications for theory and practice are discussed.