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The purpose of this study is to investigate the phenomenon of knowledge transfer between employees and coworkers. That is, when and why employees engage in knowledge seeking or knowledge sabotage when confronted with coworkers with higher relative overqualification.

This study collected survey data from 315 employee-coworker pairs in East China at three-time points.

The results showed that when the cooperative goal interdependence between employee and coworker is high, the perception of coworker’s relative overqualification will cause benign envy of employees, which in turn promote employees to engage in knowledge seeking from coworker. However, when the competitive goal interdependence between employee and coworker is high, the perception of coworker’s relative overqualification will cause malicious envy of employees, which in turn promote employees to engage in knowledge sabotage toward coworker.

This research not only expands the theoretical perspective and outcomes of relative overqualification but also enriches the mechanism of knowledge seeking and knowledge sabotage. Meanwhile, this study also provides practical guidance for enterprises to reduce knowledge sabotage.

In the period of organizational change and transformation, the attitude of employees towards change has become a key factor in the success of organizational change. Based on the uncertainty management theory (UMT), the paper considers authentic leadership as an important antecedent of employee resistance to change and explores the mediating role of perceived uncertainty and the moderating role of uncertainty avoidance between authentic leadership and employee resistance to change.

The paper conducted a questionnaire survey study and a scenario experimental study. In study 1, the authors collected two stages of data from 256 employees in Central China, one month apart. In study 2, the authors designed a scenario experiment and invited 130 Chinese adults to participate.

The authors find that authentic leadership can effectively reduce employee resistance to change by reducing employee perceived uncertainty. In addition, for individuals with a higher (vs lower) degree of uncertainty avoidance, the direct impact of authentic leadership on perceived uncertainty and the indirect impact of authentic leadership on resistance to change through perceived uncertainty are both stronger (vs lower).

The presented results reveal the mechanism between authentic leadership and employee resistance to change from cognitive perspective and depict an important step toward understanding how authentic leadership and employee uncertainty avoidance interact and how they interact with employee resistance to change.