Antecedents of Knowledge Hiding and Their Impact on Organizational Performance

Research on knowledge management has rapidly increased in the last decade, leaving a huge gap on how, why, and what triggers knowledge hiding in inter-organizational setups. Furthermore, the fostering factors for knowledge sharing have also remained unexplored because the employees in an organization are unwilling to share their knowledge with others for several reasons. The current study has attempted to explore the reasons that make employees hide their knowledge from other employees in order to excel. The individual factors considered in this study that make employees hide their knowledge are the lack of rewards for knowledge sharing, internal competition, and psychological entitlement. Furthermore, the interesting consequent factor of knowledge hiding in this study was found to be significant. The moderating role of employees' social status has a significant moderating effect on the relationship between knowledge-hiding behavior and organizational performance. The population of the study was the managerial employees of financial institutions of China and the sample size taken in his study was 446 via convenient sampling technique. The independent factors in this study found significant results of knowledge-hiding behavior, thus approving the mediating role of knowledge hiding in the organizational performance of the financial institutions of China. The software used in this study for the data analysis was smart PLS and the technique used was partial least square SEM for the measurement of the hypothesis of the study. The study's findings also have certain implications for policymaking in financial institutions that may hinder knowledge hiding practices and support the uninterrupted flow of knowledge among employees.