Psychological Well-Being, Knowledge Management Behavior and Performance: The Moderating Role of Leader-Member Exchange.

Cheol Young Kim

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.566516

Abstract

Knowledge is considered an essential resource and key to competitiveness. The behavior of sharing knowledge is an essential activity for the prosperity of the organization. For individuals, however, sharing knowledge can present a dilemma by giving up the exclusive right to certain knowledge that they own. This study identifies the psychological well-being as a leading factor in facilitating knowledge-sharing in dilemma situations. The author classified knowledge management behavior into sharing, hiding, and manipulating behavior, and studied them as mediators linking psychological well-being and performance. And to check the influence of the quality of the exchange relationship, leader-member exchange was used as a moderator. For the empirical analysis, 333 members from 12 organizations were surveyed by using different sources and times. Hierarchical regression analysis and bootstrapping analysis were conducted for verification of hypothesis. Results demonstrated that the psychological well-being influence directly on knowledge-sharing, -hiding, and -manipulating behaviors and indirectly on performance. In the multi-mediation test, only knowledge-sharing behavior mediated the relationship between psychological well-being and performance. And the moderating effect of leader-member exchange was significant only in the relationship between psychological well-being and knowledge-sharing behavior. This study contributes to the performance, knowledge management and positive psychology research fields, and suggests practical implications.

Highlights

Since the early Hawthorne studies in business literature, the causes of high productivity and the performance of happy employees have been widely known (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939)
This paper aims to confirm that employees with high psychological well-being and leader-member exchange are more active in sharing knowledge and will eventually achieve higher performance
The results show that knowledge-sharing behavior (Model 8, b = 0.44, p < 0.01) is significantly positive and knowledgehiding behavior (Model 9, b = −0.14, p < 0.05) and knowledgemanipulating behavior (Model 10, b = −0.27, p < 0.01) are significantly negative on job performance

Summary

Introduction

Since the early Hawthorne studies in business literature, the causes of high productivity and the performance of happy employees have been widely known (Roethlisberger and Dickson, 1939). The happier the members, the more they dedicate themselves to their task, produce creative ideas, and participate in organizational citizenship behaviors. This causal relationship has been accepted because of the mutually beneficial relationship in which a person exchanges favor with favor (Eagly and Chaiken, 1993; Jena et al, 2018). Because the concept of happiness is so wide and each scholar uses different definitions and measures, the study direction varies according to the research and the empirical results differ. Various behavioral and situational factors, including leadership, are involved in job performance, and the causal relationship between happiness and performance is distorted in this process. This paper aims to investigate the process concerning member happiness and performance by using psychological well-being concepts to define happiness, identifying processes that lead to performance, and analyzing the impact of leadership

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