How to motivate employees to "tell all they know": Weaken their knowledge hiding

Employee knowledge hiding impedes the flow, updating, and reconstruction of knowledge within the enterprise, thereby slowing down the knowledge innovation of employees. More seriously, it threatens the core competitiveness and performance of the enterprise, posing significant risks to its long-term development. However, few studies have explored the process mechanism and boundary conditions of the relationship between different types of team member relationship (team-member exchange and co-worker guanxi) and employee knowledge hiding. Hence, drawing on the social information processing model and conservation of resources theory, this study explores how and when different types of team member relationship can weaken employee knowledge hiding. Data came from 290 employees in knowledge-intensive industries in China. Mplus and SPSS process macro were used for data processing and analysis. The findings showed that team-member exchange and co-worker guanxi can have a negative impact on knowledge hiding through psychological safety. Leader-member exchange positively moderates the relations between team-member exchange and psychological safety, while supervisor-subordinate guanxi positively moderates the relations between co-worker guanxi and psychological safety. Leader-member exchange negatively moderates the impact of team-member exchange on knowledge hiding through psychological safety. Supervisor-subordinate guanxi negatively moderates the impact of co-worker guanxi on knowledge hiding through psychological safety. Weakening employee knowledge hiding also requires moderate cultivation of employees' psychological safety, that is, psychological safety should not be excessive, otherwise it will have the opposite effect.