The social dynamics of knowledge hiding: a diary study on the roles of incivility, entitlement, and self-control

ABSTRACT

Knowledge hiding has detrimental consequences for organizations. Hence, understanding the antecedents and boundary conditions of knowledge hiding is critical. With our diary study on daily incivility as a situational predictor and the individual difference variables of entitlement and trait self-control as person-related moderators, we attempt to contribute to this understanding. We tested our hypotheses using multilevel path modelling based on data of 75 employees who answered daily surveys on a total of 501 workdays. As hypothesized, incivility was positively related to the deceptive knowledge hiding behaviours of playing dumb and evasive hiding on the between-person level. Incivility was also positively related to supposedly non-deceptive rationalized hiding on the between-person level. On the day level, incivility was not related to knowledge hiding behaviours per se. Rather, day-specific incivility was positively related to playing dumb for employees high on trait entitlement and low on trait self-control. Entitlement and self-control did not moderate the day-level relationship of incivility with evasive hiding nor rationalized hiding. Altogether, our study yields important implications in providing input to theoretical models on knowledge hiding and being valuable for organizations wanting to prevent its occurrence.

KEYWORDS:

• Playing dumb
• incivility spirals
• entitlement
• self-control

Acknowledgments

We thank Theresa Jestaedt and Ronja Reinhardt for their support in data collection.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/1359432X.2022.2089562

Notes

1. Following recommendations by Aguinis et al. (2013), we used the Mathieu et al. (2012) multilevel power calculator to conduct a post-hoc power analysis based on the observed effect size. The power value for the cross-level interaction effect between daily incivility and trait entitlement on evasive hiding was .61 for alpha = .05, indicating that the effect might exist but was not detected in our sample. However, observed power (Bliese & Wang, 2020) was only 4.6%, indicating that this effect is indeed unlikely to exist.

2. Observed power for this effect was 59.8%.

3. Post-hoc calculated power for the observed cross-level interaction between daily incivility and trait self-control on evasive hiding was 1 for alpha = .01. Hence, power was sufficient to find an existing effect. Observed power was only 13.5%, indicating that this effect is indeed unlikely to exist.

4. Observed power for this effect was 73.3%.