The Psychology behind Knowledge Hiding in an Organization

Yoshi Takahashi,Roksana Binte Rezwan

doi:10.3390/admsci11020057

Abstract

This study aimed to understand the psychological process behind employees’ knowledge hiding (KH) behaviors in organizations. KH is an intentional act of concealing knowledge when it is requested by a colleague and can lead to counterproductive consequences for the organization. Therefore, this study synthesized previous studies (n = 88) on KH through a systematic literature review. We used the cognitive–motivational–relational (CMR) theory of emotion to create a framework for the studies’ findings. Based on the framework, the psychological process behind KH has two stages—personal goal generation and the knowledge-request event appraisal process, each of which contains its own CMR process. In the first stage, an individual’s internal and external attributes related to the organization shape their personal goals. In the second stage, an individual appraises the features of a knowledge-request event in terms of both their personal goal and the internal and external attributes that created the goal. If the knowledge request is appraised as harmful for the personal goal, emotion arises and leads to the manifestation of KH. This study contributes to the knowledge management literature as, to our knowledge, it is the first to propose a CMR theory-based framework to understand the overall psychological process behind KH.

Highlights

Organizational knowledge is a critical strategic resource for organizational success (King and Zeithaml 2003; Hamilton and Philbin 2020)
This study conducted a systematic literature review of the existing empirical research on knowledge hiding (KH) in order to answer two research questions: (1) What are the reasons for KH, according to the current literature; and (2) how can we understand the overall psychological process behind KH based on the findings of the current literature?
According to our inclusion criteria, we considered studies that empirically explored the construct “knowledge hiding.”

Summary

Introduction

Organizational knowledge is a critical strategic resource for organizational success (King and Zeithaml 2003; Hamilton and Philbin 2020). Research emphasizes the role of knowledge management and employees’ knowledge sharing practices in improving firms’ performances and developing their competitive advantage (Singh 2019; Fonseca et al 2021). Studies have found that KH is a hindrance to knowledge sharing (Qureshi and Evans 2015; Liu et al 2020a) but is detrimental to organizations, as it can affect a firm’s decision-making quality (Ghasemaghaei and Turel 2021), idea implementation (Li et al 2020), organizational performance, team performance (Chatterjee et al 2021), and creativity (Bogilovic et al 2017; Fong et al 2018; Peng et al 2019), in addition to employees’ turnover intention (Serenko and Bontis 2016) and organizational citizenship behaviors (Arain et al 2020). More research on KH is required to achieve a successful promotion of knowledge transfer within organizations (Wang et al 2018a)

Methods

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Discussion

Conclusion