The Relationship Between Perceptions of Leader Hypocrisy and Employees’ Knowledge Hiding Behaviors: Testing a Moderated Mediation Model

Purpose: Knowledge-sharing is critical for the survival and development of today’s organization, but employees are not always willing to share their knowledge and sometimes even hide it intentionally or unintentionally. Taken from the leadership perspective, this paper aims to investigate the influence of leader hypocrisy on employees’ knowledge-hiding behaviors. Drawing on the self-determination theory (SDT), this paper explores the mediating role of basic psychological needs satisfaction, as well as the moderating effect of employees’ interdependent self-construal on the relationship between basic psychological needs satisfaction and knowledge-hiding behaviors. The moderated mediation effect is also tested. Methods: The data were collected from companies located in mainland China. The data sample for analysis consists of 336 employees. Hierarchical regression analysis was adopted to test the hypotheses of our proposed model. Results: Leader hypocrisy are positively related to knowledge-hiding behaviors ( b = 0.490, p < 0.01). Basic psychological needs satisfaction plays a partial mediating role in such relationship ( b =0.118, 0.056, 0.210). The interdependent self-construal moderates the relationship between basic psychological needs satisfaction and knowledge-hiding behaviors ( b = 0.134, p < 0.01), as well as the moderated mediation effect (BootSE = 0.018, − 0.083, − 0.009). Conclusion: The results show that leader hypocrisy is positively related to knowledge-hiding behaviors, and basic psychological needs satisfaction partially mediates such relationship. The interdependent self-construal weakens the negative relationship between basic psychological needs satisfaction and knowledge hiding. Keywords: leader hypocrisy, basic psychological needs satisfaction, knowledge hiding, interdependent self-construal