Consequences of knowledge hiding: The differential compensatory effects of guilt and shame

By Anne Burmeister, Ulrike Fasbender, Fabiola H. Gerpott. Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, 2018

175 citations recorded by the source corpus.

textabstractThe nature of the consequences of knowledge hiding, defined as an intentional attempt to withhold knowledge that has been requested, and the mechanisms through which knowledge hiding affects outcomes are under-theorized. In this research, we propose that knowledge hiding can evoke guilt and shame in the knowledge hiding perpetrator. We zoom into the three types of knowledge hiding—evasive hiding, playing dumb, and rationalized hiding—and predict that the more deceptive knowledge hiding types, namely evasive hiding and playing dumb, evoke stronger feelings of guilt and shame than rationalized hiding. We further argue that guilt and shame trigger differential emotion-based reparatory mechanisms, such that guilt induces the motivation to correct one’s transgressions through organizational citizenship behavior (OCB), whereas shame induces the tendency to withdraw after hiding knowledge, as reflected in lower levels of OCB. We test the proposed positive indirect relation between knowledge hiding and OCB via guilt, and the proposed negative indirect relation via shame in a scenario-based experiment and a two-wave field study. The studies provided support for most of our hypotheses. We discuss how the proposed emotion pathway can facilitate nuanced theorizing about consequences of knowledge hiding for different types of negative emotions and subsequent compensatory work behaviors.

Subfields: Information Systems and Management, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Social Psychology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/c3cdd8c60088f1653a0752cb593711432e0be12d

How researchers see this paper

The researchers whose trusted networks rank it highest, strongest advocate first. Every researcher gets a different order.

In Information Systems and Management

1. Anne Burmeister
2. Ulrike Fasbender
3. Hadar Nesher Shoshan
4. Fabiola H. Gerpott
5. Laura Venz

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

1. Anne Burmeister
2. Ulrike Fasbender
3. Hadar Nesher Shoshan
4. Fabiola H. Gerpott
5. Laura Venz

In Social Psychology

1. Hadar Nesher Shoshan
2. Fabiola H. Gerpott
3. Anne Burmeister
4. Laura Venz
5. Ulrike Fasbender

Citations in the corpus

• Be smart, play dumb? A transactional perspective on day-specific knowledge hiding, interpersonal conflict, and psychological strain (2021, background): “…study contributes to literature that addresses the instrumentality of CWBs (Krischer et al., 2010; Reynolds et al., 2015; Shoss et al., 2016) and complements research that focused on the negative intrapersonal consequences of knowledge hiding (e.g., Burmeister et al., 2019; Offergelt et al., 2019).”
• Respectful leadership and followers’ knowledge sharing: A social mindfulness lens (2020, background): “We also included education (i.e. binary coded with 0 = no university degree and 1 = university degree) as a control variable because a university degree may be an indicator for employees’ greater amount of knowledge resources that can potentially be shared with colleagues (Burmeister et al., 2018c).”