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The purpose of this paper is to examine why and when employees hide knowledge. Individuals may tend to hide knowledge when they have strong psychological ownership feelings over knowledge. Therefore, this research builds and tests a theoretical model linking knowledge‐based psychological ownership with knowledge hiding via territoriality.

Data were collected from knowledge workers in China via a three‐wave web‐based survey. The final sample was 190 cases. Hierarchical regression models and a bootstrapping approach were used to test the hypotheses.

The results show that knowledge‐based psychological ownership positively affects knowledge hiding. Territoriality fully mediates the link between knowledge‐based psychological ownership and knowledge hiding. Moreover, organization‐based psychological ownership moderates the positive link between territoriality and knowledge hiding. Specifically, territoriality will mediate the indirect effect of knowledge‐based psychological ownership on knowledge hiding when organization‐based psychological ownership is low, but not when it is high.

The research reflects that to reduce knowledge hiding, organizations should focus on practices that can decrease employees' self‐perception of possession of knowledge and territoriality and that can strengthen employees' psychological ownership for organizations.

Although many actions have been adopted to foster knowledge management in companies, knowledge hiding is still prevalent in work settings. This paper highlights the predictive power of knowledge‐based psychological ownership on knowledge hiding, and the mediating role of territoriality in the link between knowledge‐based psychological ownership and knowledge hiding.

This paper aims to examine how ethical leadership alleviates knowledge contribution loafing among engineering designers through the mediating effect of knowledge-based psychological ownership and the moderating effect of emotion regulation strategies.

This study adopts a questionnaire survey to obtain 344 valid sample from engineering designers and uses partial least squares-structural equation modeling to analyze data.

The results demonstrate that ethical leadership is a key factor to alleviate knowledge contribution loafing. Knowledge-based psychological ownership is a main factor causing knowledge contribution loafing and mediates the influence of ethical leadership on knowledge contribution loafing. Furthermore, cognitive reappraisal (a response-focused emotion regulation strategy) moderates the relationship between ethical leadership and knowledge contribution loafing, and the effect of ethical leadership on knowledge contribution loafing is stronger when cognitive reappraisal is high.

Engineering design organizations may inspire ethical leadership and pay attention to psychological state of designers. Leaders may help designers overcome knowledge-based psychological ownership by the influence of ethical leadership. During the process of knowledge interaction, designers may adopt cognitive reappraisal strategy consciously.

This study addresses the knowledge gap that ethical leadership affects knowledge contribution loafing with knowledge-based psychological ownership as the intermediary. This study also advances the literature on leadership and emotion regulation and extends the scope of social learning theory in knowledge management domain through examining the moderate role of emotion regulation strategies.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the meditating role of psychological ownership which includes both organisation-based psychological ownership (OPO) and knowledge-based psychological ownership (KPO) on the relationship between affective commitment and knowledge sharing.

This paper is an empirical study based on structural equation modelling, with a sample of 293 employees from 31 high-technology firms in China.

The result indicated that affective commitment had a significant positive effect on OPO but no effect on KPO; OPO was positively related to both common and key knowledge sharing, while KPO exerted a negative impact on both; common knowledge sharing was positively related to key knowledge sharing; the relationship between affective commitment and key knowledge sharing was multi-mediated by OPO and common knowledge sharing.

OPO and KPO play an essential role in transferring the effect of employees’ affective commitment to common knowledge sharing and key knowledge sharing, which unravels the blackbox of how effective commitment affects knowledge sharing.

The purpose of this paper is to examine why employees hide knowledge and how organizations intervene and influence the negative effects of knowledge hiding. This study builds and tests a theoretical model at both individual and team level.

Data were collected from universities, research institutes and enterprises’ research and development (R&D) teams in China via a two-wave survey. The final sample contained 417 cases. Hierarchical linear modeling was used to test hypotheses.

The results show that territoriality plays a mediating role between psychological ownership and knowledge hiding, and that organizational result justice negatively moderated the relationship between territoriality and knowledge hiding. Procedure justice negatively moderated the relationship between territoriality and rationalized hiding, and that between territoriality and evasive hiding. Interactive justice negatively moderated the relationship between territoriality and rationalized hiding, and that between territoriality and evasive hiding. There were thus interactive effects among territoriality, perceived knowledge value and psychological ownership; the relationship between individual psychological ownership and territoriality was weaker when perceived knowledge value was lower and task interdependence was higher, and stronger with higher perceived knowledge value and lower task interdependence.

Territorial behaviors, such as knowledge hoarding and misleading within R&D teams, are the primary challenges for organizations’ positive activities, including internal sharing, teamwork and organizational goal accomplishment. Researching knowledge territoriality in the Chinese cultural context will help to distinguish territorial behaviors and to take preventive measures. In addition, this study not only enables managers to understand clearly the precipitating factors of knowledge territoriality and the relationships among them but also provides constructive strategies for reducing the negative effect of organizational intervention in knowledge territoriality.

This study adopts a multilevel modeling method and not only reveals the “black box” of interaction among psychological ownership, territoriality and knowledge hiding at the individual level but also probes the three-way interaction of perceived knowledge value, team task dependency and psychological ownership with territoriality at both individual and team levels, and then discusses the mediation effect of organizational justice on the relationship between territoriality and knowledge hiding. The conclusion of this study not only enriches the literature on knowledge hiding in the field of knowledge management but also helps to elucidate the function and intervention mechanism of knowledge hiding.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the curvilinear relationship between knowledge leadership and knowledge hiding and the moderating role of psychological ownership on influencing the curvilinear relationship.

In total, 403 data were collected from participants in a high-technology company via a two-wave survey. Hierarchical regression analyses were used to test the hypotheses.

Results revealed an inverted U-shaped relationship between knowledge leadership and knowledge hiding. The employees exhibited more knowledge hiding in a moderate level of knowledge leadership than in lower and higher levels of knowledge leadership. Moreover, psychological ownership significantly moderated the curvilinear relationship such that the inverted U-shaped relationship was more pronounced among employees with high psychological ownership.

Employees’ reaction to knowledge leadership may vary from different levels of knowledge leadership. Moreover, organizations should boost employees’ psychological ownership especially for the collective identity that helps them own knowledge as “ours.”

This study extends both the leadership and knowledge management behavior literatures.

This study aims to explore the transmission mechanism of individual idea generation on team idea implementation and elucidate the relationships among team knowledge territoriality, team information exchange and team trust, which can better improve team knowledge sharing, decrease individual knowledge hiding or territoriality and assist the team in solving the predicament of idea implementation.

The data were collected by the paired method from 56 Chinese companies’ R&D teams, which comprised 356 valid samples. Besides, structure equitation modeling and hierarchical linear modeling were used to test the hypotheses.

Team knowledge territoriality had a significant positive impact on individual idea generation, team information exchange and team idea implementation. Team information exchange mediated the relationship between team knowledge territoriality and team idea implementation. Moreover, team information exchange positively moderated the relationship between team knowledge territoriality and individual idea generation. Furthermore, the relationship between individual idea generation and team idea implementation was mediated by team trust.

This study augments the theoretical research of territoriality and innovation process. From the viewpoint of knowledge territoriality to describe the coexistence of knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding in the organization, this study reveals the influence mechanism of team knowledge territoriality on team innovation process. Overall, this study provides empirical support that team territoriality can weaken the adverse impact of individual territoriality on innovation to a certain extent.

Knowledge sharing (KS) has been consistently acknowledged as a critical factor in the organizational development and the betterment of employees. The purpose of this paper is to extend previous empirical research on KS by testing psychological ownership as an underlying mechanism between the relationship of organizational justice (OJ) and KS behavior in developing country context. The authors also examine the moderating role of perceived organizational support (POS) between psychological ownership and KS behavior.

Using a survey questionnaire, data from 348 employees of multinational corporations in Pakistan were used to test the research hypotheses.

The results of this research reveal that dimensions of OJ (procedural, distributive and interactional justice) positively influence psychological ownership. In addition, psychological ownership is found as an underlying psychological mechanism between the relationship of OJ and KS behavior. The results also indicate that a higher level of POS strengthens the relationship between psychological ownership and KS behavior.

Organizations can enhance employees’ sense of psychological ownership by providing them fairness in procedures and resources. Moreover, management can create a perception of equality among the employees which subsequently helps employees engage in sharing their valuable knowledge with their team members and other workers in the organization.

This research suggests that psychological ownership and POS are important factors which influence the relationship between OJ and KS behavior and it empirically tests this model in a developing country context.

The purpose of this study is to examine the relationships among knowledge attributes (complexity and implicitness), interpersonal distrust, knowledge hiding (KH) and team efficacy and second, to explore a new dimension of KH.

Data for this research were collected from more than 940 employees working in manufacturing, information technology (IT), finance and the purification industry. Structural equation modeling was used to test hypothesized relationships.

First, the research confirmed the existence of bullying hiding behaviors in the knowledge economy era based on “knowledge power.” Second, the findings suggest that knowledge attributes are an important predictor of KH behaviors in organizations. The findings implicate the mediating effect of interpersonal distrust and the moderating role of team efficacy, while team efficacy negatively moderated the relationships between interpersonal distrust with evasive hiding and playing dumb, but positively moderated the relationship between interpersonal distrust with rationalized hiding and bullying hiding.

This is the first study to propose bullying hiding, a behavior that has emerged in organizational knowledge transfer, and it is more detrimental to knowledge sharing than other KH behaviors. The results of research on the different regulating effects of team efficacy on KH behaviors enrich the boundary conditions of KH research.

Changing customer demands, needs and desires; emerging technologies; and increasing competition among firms force software development teams to develop and then implement new software projects to satisfy their customers and become more competitive in their marketplace. In this respect, knowledge sharing is critical for project success. However, although knowledge sharing among team members has been investigated by many researchers, knowledge sharing barriers among people have rarely been addressed in project teams in general and software development teams in particular. Thus, the purpose of this study is to investigate knowledge sharing barriers in the software development team context and develop solutions that can overcome these barriers.

An exploratory multiple case design was used to explore why software team members in Turkey may be reluctant to share knowledge. In this study, the authors conducted 18 in-depth and on-site semi-structured interviews and then employed content analysis, which uses a set of procedures to make valid inferences from text, to discover knowledge sharing barriers.

By interviewing 18 Turkish project team managers, the authors identified knowledge-, individual- and organization-related knowledge sharing barriers among team members. They also demonstrated solutions for the knowledge sharing hesitation among team members based on the experiences of project team managers.

Some methodological limitations exist in this study. Specifically, the generalizability of the sampling limits the study, which was conducted in a specific national context, Turkish firms in general and the Istanbul district in particular. It is important to note that readers should be cautious when generalizing the results to different cultural contexts. In this regard, a Turkish sample involving the Istanbul district, like that of any culturally bound research, imposes some constraints on the interpretation and application of the results. The study was conducted with in-depth interviews of only 18 managers working in seven companies. Also, this study was performed on system development teams. The results should be confirmed with more samples and different project sets.

In this study, the authors discover the reasons for knowledge sharing reluctance among team members and some solutions that will eliminate knowledge sharing problems by using case studies. The results show that the reluctance of team members arises from obstacles, which are knowledge-, individual- and organization-related. Also, the conclusions demonstrate that knowledge sharing barriers can be resolved by establishing project leadership, creating a knowledge sharing culture and considering team members’ emotions.

The present study investigated whether reluctance to share knowledge derives not only from individual barriers but also from organization- and knowledge-related barriers in a project team context. The authors discovered that knowledge sharing barriers can be resolved by establishing project leadership, creating a knowledge sharing culture and considering team members’ emotions.

The significance of managing and sharing employee knowledge for successful organizational change, innovation, and for sustainable advantage has indeed been suggested by research since the last few decades. Despite numerous attempts to foster the sharing of knowledge in organizations, employees may not always be willing to share knowledge attributed due to personal beliefs or situational constraints leading to hiding of knowledge. This article provides a theoretical basis by identifying and illustrating the present and the possible myriad of knowledge hiding (KH) events by employees within organizations.

Drawing literature from numerous sources, this paper adopts synthesis and provides a review of the literature and proposes framework.

This paper identifies six broad drivers which may lead to KH, including: driven by situation explain the reason for unintentional hiding as a result of performance and competition leads to individual to have a motive to hide knowledge, driven by psychological ownership leads to controlled hiding, driven by hostility and abuse by employees or managers leads to victimized hiding and lastly driven by identity and norms leads to favoured hiding. Furthermore, this study uncovers three potential future events, which need managerial attention: negative reciprocity, influenced disengagement and perceived disengagement.

This paper also offers new insights to managers to understand the present events and foresee the possible reasons about the KH behaviour and how they can strategize to reduce these events and undergo organizational change.