To Empower or Not to Empower? Multilevel Effects of Empowering Leadership on Knowledge Hiding

By Meizhen Lin, Xiujuan Zhang, B. C. Ng, Lirong Zhong. 2020

100 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Abstract It is widely acknowledged that knowledge hiding persists and has detrimental effects in service organizations. With organizations increasingly becoming team based, understanding the interactions between supervisor and team members especially how team- and individual-level empowering leadership behaviors influence followers’ knowledge hiding is important. Using data on 527 followers from 60 departments in 19 Chinese hotels, the study proposes a multilevel model to examine the manifestation of two types of empowering leadership (individual-focused and differentiated empowering leadership) and the dual-level processes on followers’ knowledge hiding. Results show that differentiated empowering leadership is positively related to followers’ knowledge hiding via group relational conflict, whereas individual-focused empowering leadership is negatively related to followers’ knowledge hiding via their psychological safety. In addition, follower’s psychological safety buffers the positive relationship between group relational conflict and followers’ knowledge hiding. We discuss the implications on both theory and practice of empowering leadership on knowledge hiding.

Subfields: Artificial Intelligence, Communication, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/583cc6647632e0db404465386b6ef7e26b70ee03