How Peer Abusive Supervision Affects Sales Employees’ Customer Knowledge Hiding: The Roles of Rivalry and Schadenfreude

Abstract

Purpose

This study aims to examine the impacts of peer abusive supervision, perceived rivalry and schadenfreude over the abused peers on sales employees’ customer knowledge hiding.

Methods

We conducted multiple regression analyses of 283 sales employees’ responses from two Chinese and two South Korean electronic device companies to test the hypotheses, which constitute a theoretical framework.

Results

Our empirical results confirmed the positive impact of peer abusive supervision on sales employees’ customer knowledge hiding, with the relationship moderated by rivalry and schadenfreude; moreover, rivalry and schadenfreude jointly exert the greatest impacts on the main effect.

Conclusion

This study sheds light on the knowledge hiding literature, with theoretical implications for the research regarding the spillover effect of abusive supervision, rivalry, schadenfreude, customer knowledge sharing, and managerial practices about the management of customer knowledge among sales employees.

Keywords:

• peer abusive supervision
• customer knowledge hiding
• rivalry
• schadenfreude
• sales employees

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were conducted under the Declaration of Helsinki guidelines, reviewed and approved by Chongqing Technology and Business University. The participants provided their informed consent to participate in this study.

Acknowledgments

We would like to acknowledge the financial support from the 2021 Humanities and Social Sciences Planning Fund Project by the Ministry of Education (21YJA630035).

Disclosure

The authors report no conflicts of interest in this work.