A Cross-level Research On The Effect Of Servant Leadership On Employees' Knowledge Hiding

In the era of knowledge economy,knowledge is regarded as the source of value creation for organizations.Therefore,more and more modern organizations actively build knowledge management system in order to obtain and maintain the sustainable competitive advantage.In recent years,knowledge hiding,as a negative behavior in the field of knowledge management,has been widely concerned.The organization has clearly realized that knowledge hiding has a negative impact on knowledge-exchange and knowledge-sharing within the organization,which lead to negative results such as weakened creativity and destructed interpersonal relationship.What's worse,the negative effect caused by knowledge hiding is stronger and longer than the positive effect by knowledge sharing.Therefore,a series of measures for knowledge hiding are carried out in the organization,such as improving the sense of organizational support and justice,strengthening the exchange relationship between leaders and subordinates,and empowering employees etc.However,knowledge hiding is still prevalent in organizations.In view of the harmfulness and universality of knowledge hiding,how to restrain employees' knowledge hiding behavior is not only an important task for organizations to participate in knowledge management practice,but also an important topic in the field of academic research.In the empirical research,on the one hand,the research results demonstrates that leadership behavior,as an important organizational context factor,has an important impact on the shaping of individual psychological ownership,attitude and behavior.On the other hand,researchers call for further joint study of leadership behavior and human resource management practice,which is conducive to a more comprehensive reflection of the impact of organizational situational factors on individual outcome.Therefore,in line with the concept of "people-oriented" social development,this study focuses on positive and comprehensive servant leadership,introduces the developmental human resource practices and traditionality and constructs a multi-level theoretical analysis model,for the purpose of exploring the cross-level influence and mechanism of team-level servant leadership behavior on employees' individual knowledge hiding behavior in China's organizational context.Specifically speaking,this study focuses on the theme of "how servant leadership affects employees' knowledge hiding behavior",and explores the influence effect,mechanism and boundary conditions of servant leadership at team level on employees' knowledge hiding behavior at individual level.It unfolds in three steps as below.Firstly,based on social exchange theory,this study explores and verifies whether team-level servant leadership can have a significant positive impact on individual-level employee's knowledge hiding behavior.Secondly,based on the regulatory focus theory,this paper analyzes the mechanism of team-level service leadership on individual-level employee knowledge hiding,that is to say,to explore the mediating effect of employee's promotive psychological ownership between servant leadership and employee's knowledge hiding,as well as the mediating effect of employee's defensive psychological ownership between servant leadership and employee's knowledge hiding,and find out the difference in two mediating effects.Finally,based on the situational intensity theory,this paper discusses how team-level developmental human resource practices and traditionality respectively mediate the relationship between servant leadership and individual promotive psychological ownership,as well as the relationship between servant leadership and individual defensive psychological ownership.To verify the cross-level conceptual model proposed in this paper,this research bases on the knowledge intensive industries(e.g.,science and technology,education,medical care and finance),selects the employees engaged in creative work as the research object,adopts questionnaire method self-assessed by employees,and carries out a long-term investigation on Enterprises from Chengdu,Chongqing,Beijing,Changsha and other regions at three stages(one month interval in each stage).The questionnaires were distributed and collected by online questionnaire platform through two channels: first,the author contacted alumni and friends in Chengdu,Chongqing,Shanghai,Beijing,Changsha and other places,and ask them to help complete the distribution and collection of the questionnaire;second,the author contacted some senior executives or department leaders of enterprises in Chengdu and Chongqing,obtaining the informed consent of relevant department leaders,and then send questionnaires to the employees of their teams.Finally,the study collected effective sample data of 349 members from 81 teams of 81 enterprises.Based on cross-level statistical analysis and hypothesis verification,it comes to the conclusion as below:Firstly,team-level servant leadership poses a negative impact on employee's knowledge hiding behavior.From the perspective of social exchange theory,this study verifies the negative relationship between team-level servant leadership and individual-level employee's knowledge hiding behavior by cross-level path analysis.The empirical results indicates that employees' knowledge hiding behavior is affected not only by individual-level factors,but also by team-level leadership behavior.Secondly,servant leadership at team level poses influence on employee's knowledge hiding through the mediating role of individual employee's promotive and defensive psychological ownership respectively.In other words,the effect of team-level servant leadership on individual-level employees' knowledge hiding behavior is not direct,which is indirectly realized by affecting employees' internal psychological state,and different mediating role further lead to different effect on employee's knowledge hiding.In details,employee's promotive psychological ownership functio ns better than employee's defensive psychological ownership in restraining employee's knowledge hiding,by comparison with psychological ownership.Therefore,promotive psychological ownership is the best path between team-level servant leadership and individual employee knowledge hiding.Thirdly,team-level traditionality weakens the positive effect of team-level servant leadership on employee's promotive psychological ownership.The lower the team traditionality,the stronger the positive effect of servant leadership on employee promotive psychological ownership,and vice versa.In other words,at low level of traditionality,the positive effect of servant leadership on employee's promotive psychological ownership is stronger.However,at high level of traditionality,the effect of servant leadership on employee's promotive psychological ownership is significantly weakened.This shows that the traditional values shared by the team members can weaken the role of servant leadership in some cases.Fourthly,developmental human resource practices strengthens the negative effect of team-level servant leadership on employees' defensive psychological ownership.The higher the practice level of team development oriented human resource management,the stronger the negative impact of servant leadership on employees' defensive psychological ownership,and vice versa.In other words,the negative effect of servant leadership on employee's defensive psychological ownership is strengthened in the work team with high level of developmental human resource practices,but the effect of servant leadership on employee's defensive Po is not obvious in the team with low level of developmental human resource practices.This shows that team-level developmental human resource practices can strengthen the role of servant leadership in some cases.The innovation of this study is mainly reflected in the following three points:Firstly,it expands the research perspective of antecedents of knowledge hiding.As an important part of knowledge management,the existing literatures,this paper mainly discusses the antecedents of knowledge hiding from the aspects of individual level,interpersonal relationship and organizational factors,but rarely takes the servant leadership as an entry point to explore its mechanism of action on individual knowledge hiding behavior.Therefore,this paper explores the path of servant leadership on individual knowledge hiding,expands the research results of antecedents of knowledge hiding,and responds to the appeal of scholars for expanding the antecedents of knowledge hiding.In addition,reviewing the research on antecedents of knowledge hiding,it is found that few studies explore the formation mechanism of individual knowledge hiding behavior at team level and cross level.Therefore,this paper extends the servant leadership to the team level and discusses how the team servant leadership affects the knowledge hiding behavior of employees across levels,which enriches the research on the influencing factors of knowledge hiding at different levels.Secondly,it enriches the research on the mediating mechanism of the differentiation between the promotive and the defensive psychological ownership.Scholars often use the one-dimensional psychological ownership scale in the research of psychological ownership,ignoring the differential transmission effect of different dimensions of psychological ownership.In view of this,from the perspective of regulatory focus,this paper uses two kinds of psychological ownership measurement tools classified by Avey et al.to verify the transmission effect of promotive and defensive psychological ownership between team-level service leadership and individual knowledge hiding behavior.The empirical results show that the mediating effect of promotive psychological ownership is significantly greater than that of defensive psychological ownership.That is to say,mediating through promotive psychological ownership is the best route between servant leadership and knowledge hiding in this study.This conclusion enriches the relevant research results of psychological ownership,and further deepens the understanding of the relationship between servant leadership and knowledge hiding.Thirdly,it expands the boundary conditions for service-oriented leadership to play its role.Due to the fact that servant leadership is paid attention in only recent years,the existing empirical research on servant leadership is still very scarce,and its boundary conditions need to be further explored.Therefore,this paper explores the impact of interaction of developmental human resource practices with servant leadership on employees' psychological ownership,which responds to the call of an integration of these two research topics.In addition,this paper explores the moderating effect of team level traditionality on the relationship between servant leadership and employee psychological ownership,expanding the knowledge on the relationship between traditionality and leadership.