For the sake of my job security: examining the effect of age-based stereotype threat on older workers’ knowledge hiding
Abstract
Purpose
Organizations can greatly benefit from the transfer of knowledge from older employees to younger generations. However, older workers often hesitate to share their expertise with their younger colleagues. Grounded in conservation of resources theory and the stereotype threat framework, this study aims at examining the negative impact of age-based stereotype threat on organizational knowledge management.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors developed a moderated mediation model and collected data from 219 older workers with a time-lagged design to explore the effect of age-based stereotype threat on older workers’ knowledge hiding.
Findings
The results showed that age-based stereotype threat could lead to knowledge hiding behaviors among older workers due to increased job insecurity, and leader-member exchange can potentially mitigate these effects.
Originality/value
The findings underscore the detrimental effect of age-based stereotype threat on organizational knowledge management and suggest that organizations should foster an age-inclusive environment to facilitate effective intergenerational knowledge transfer.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
Funding: This study is supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No. 72072057).
Data availability statement: The data that support the findings of this study are available from the corresponding author upon reasonable request.
Declaration of competing interest: The authors declare that they have no known competing interests or personal conflicts that could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.
IRB statement: This study involves human participants and has been approved by the Human Research Protection Committee of East China Normal University, ethical approval number is HR 487-2023.
Citation
Duan, Y., Liu, H., Wang, Z. and Tse, H.H.M. (2024), "For the sake of my job security: examining the effect of age-based stereotype threat on older workers’ knowledge hiding", Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JKM-03-2024-0324
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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