Trapped in a loss spiral: how and when work alienation relates to knowledge hiding

Abstract

Drawing on conservation of resources theory, we hypothesize that work alienation promotes knowledge hiding through emotional exhaustion and that job mobility moderates the relationship between work alienation and emotional exhaustion. We conducted two time-lagged studies in China to test our research model. Studies 1 and 2 found that work alienation was positively related to knowledge hiding and that emotional exhaustion mediated this relationship. Study 2 revealed that job mobility attenuated the positive effect of work alienation on emotional exhaustion and the indirect effects of work alienation on evasive hiding, playing dumb, and rationalized hiding via emotional exhaustion. The present research sheds valuable light on the processes (how) and contingencies (when) whereby work alienation affects knowledge hiding for the first time, thus extending prior research and encouraging further explorations on the topic of work alienation and knowledge hiding.

Keywords:

• Conservation of resources theory
• emotional exhaustion
• job mobility
• knowledge hiding
• work alienation

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Data availability statement

The data that support the findings of this study are available from the first author, Limin Guo, upon reasonable request.

Notes

1 Given the recent discussions on the use (and misuse) of control variables (Becker, 2005; Spector & Brannick, 2011), we ran our analyses both with and without control variables. The results in these two cases were similar. Here, we report our results with control variables. The results without control variables are available upon request. We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this suggestion.

2 We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for offering this insight.

3 Similar to Study 1, we report the results with control variables, and the results without control variables are available upon request.

4 We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for offering this insight.

5 We thank one of the anonymous reviewers for offering this insight.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Shanghai Planning Office of Philosophy and Social Science (2017BGL001) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (72072128).