Does abusive supervision always promote employees to hide knowledge? From both reactance and COR perspectives

Knowledge hiding as an important topic in knowledge management field might be triggered by abusive supervision, but few studies discussed how to alleviate the effect of abusive supervision on knowledge hiding. Drawing on both reactance theory and conservation of resources (COR) theory, this study aims to build a moderated mediation framework to examine effects of abusive supervision on knowledge hiding via job insecurity and under moderation of motivational climate (including mastery climate and performance climate).

The paper uses a two-wave survey study among 155 knowledge workers from educational and manufacturing industries.

Results show that abusive supervision is not significantly related to knowledge hiding directly but indirectly via job insecurity. Abusive supervision’s interaction with mastery climate is negatively related to knowledge hiding, but its interaction with performance climate is positively related to knowledge hiding. The indirect relation of abusive supervision to knowledge hiding via job insecurity is significantly moderated by mastery climate but not by performance climate.

Despite contributions, this study also has some limitations. Variables rated from the same source (i.e. employees) may have common method bias although the two-wave design does help alleviate this concern.

The paper highlights important reasons why people hide knowledge at work (because of abusive supervision and job insecurity) and identifies a boundary condition (mastery climate) which will reduce abusive supervision’s influence on knowledge hiding.

This paper contributes to knowledge hiding literature which is an important part of knowledge management from the perspective of abusive supervision based on both reactance theory and COR theory.