Tit for Tat: Abusive Supervision and Knowledge Hiding-The Role of Psychological Contract Breach and Psychological Ownership.

Usman Ghani,Timothy Teo,Rana Muhammad Naeem,Habib Gul,Zia Ul Islam,Jing Yuan,Humera Bahadar,Xuesong Zhai,Yan Li,Muhammad Usman

doi:10.3390/ijerph17041240

Abstract

The extant literature has focused on individuals’ knowledge-sharing behavior and its driving factors, which stimulate the knowledge transmission and exchange in organizations. However, little research has focused on factors that inhibit knowledge sharing and encourage individuals to hide their knowledge. Therefore, based on social exchange and displaced aggression theories, the study proposed and checked a model that examined the effect of abusive supervision on knowledge hiding (KH) via a psychological contract breach (PCB). The Psychological ownership was regarded as a boundary condition on abusive supervision and KH relationship. Using a time-lagged method, we recruited 344 full-time employees enrolled in an executive development program in a large university in China. The findings show that PCB mediates the association between abusive supervision and KH. Similarly, psychological ownership moderates the association between abusive supervision and KH. Employees with high psychological ownership minimized the effect of abusive supervision on KH. Based on study findings, contributions to theory and practice, limitations, and future directions are discussed.

Highlights

Knowledge management is a process to ensure the transmission of knowledge throughout the organization [1,2,3]
The current study addresses three important research questions: (1) Does abusive supervision positively influence individuals’ knowledge hiding (KH) behaviors? (2) Does psychological contract breach (PCB) mediate the relationship between abusive supervision and KH? (3) Does psychological ownership moderate the relationship between abusive supervision and KH?
The original measurement model was linked with a common latent factor (CLF) and the outcome did not show any significant loss in the factor loadings

Summary

Introduction

Knowledge management is a process to ensure the transmission of knowledge throughout the organization [1,2,3]. Organizational development and growth depend on how individuals share knowledge collectively in the workplace to achieve organizational goals [4,5]. Knowledge-sharing among employees adds values to firms, employees become unwilling, reluctant, and dispassionate to share knowledge with their colleagues, which are known as knowledge hiding (KH) [6,7]. The reasons for hiding knowledge is to bear personal cost by sharing loss of status, Int. J. Res. Public Health 2020, 17, 1240; doi:10.3390/ijerph17041240 www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph

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