| Employees are carriers of knowledge.Encouraging employees to share knowledge can promote the renewal and circulation of knowledge within the enterprise.However,it is very common to see that employees are unwilling to share knowledge and deliberately conceal knowledge.Therefore,scholars have carried out a lot of research on the causes of knowledge hiding.Many studies have focused on the impact of leader-member exchange on knowledge hiding.However,leader-member exchange does not exist in isolation.In the team,employees will unconsciously compare the relationship between themselves and their leaders with the relationship between colleagues and leaders.The subjective perception of comparison is called leader-member exchange social comparison.However,most of the current research on the antecedents of knowledge hiding focuses on the role of leader-member exchange,and less on how the social comparison process of leader-member exchange affects knowledge hiding.One study has found that when employees with poor leader-member exchange perceive that the relationship between colleagues and leaders is better than their own,they will be jealous of colleagues and thus hide knowledge.However,for employees who have a better relationship with leaders,when they perceive that their relationship with leaders is better than that of colleagues,what changes will occur in their psychological state and how knowledge hiding behavior will be affected.The internal mechanism and boundary conditions need further exploration.Based on self-evaluation theory and social comparison theory,this research explores how leader-member exchange social comparison influences knowledge hiding through psychological entitlement,and analyzes the moderating effect of competitive climate.This research adopts four different research designs to verify the hypotheses.Study 1(n = 478)used the questionnaire survey to collect data of full-time employees in the real workplace and tested the theoretical model proposed in the present study.Study 2(n = 210)carried out a scenario experiment to manipulate the leader-member exchange social comparison,tested its impact on psychological entitlement,and verified the causal relationship between leader-member exchange social comparison and psychological entitlement.Study 3(n =88)used the critical incident technique to manipulate psychological entitlement and tested its impact on knowledge hiding.In study 4(n = 248),the mediating role of psychological entitlement between leader-member exchange social comparison and knowledge hiding was re-validated by a scenario experiment.Based on the above four studies,the results showed that leader-member exchange social comparison positively influenced psychological entitlement(study 1,study 2);psychological entitlement positively influenced employees’ knowledge hiding behavior(study 1,study 3);psychological entitlement played a mediating role between leadermember exchange social comparison and knowledge hiding(study 1,study 4);Competitive climate will strengthen the positive correlation between psychological entitlement and knowledge hiding,and also strengthen the indirect effect of psychological entitlement between leader-member exchange social comparison and knowledge hiding(study 1).This research makes several contributions.Theoretically,first,this research provides a new theoretical perspective for explaining knowledge hiding,and promotes the understanding of the antecedents of knowledge hiding and its internal mechanism as well as boundary conditions.Second,this research finds out the potential negative impact of leader-member exchange social comparison and expands the research field of leadermember exchange social comparison.Third,this research enlightens related studies on the antecedents of psychological entitlement.Practically,this research provides a reliable reference for knowledge management practices of organizations,and helps managers to comprehensively identify the influence of leader-member exchange social comparison on knowledge hiding. |
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