Drawing from Conservation of Resource theory, this study takes target’s perspective on co-workers’ knowledge hiding and its impact on target’s political acts. We further propose that knowledge hiding depletes target’s cognitive resources which in turn lead target to disengage morally. Resultantly, morally disengaged employees tend to engage in political acts. Using survey method, data was collected from 234 respondents working in public sector organizations of Pakistan. We employed CB-SEM to analyse hypothesized relationships. Results display a positive relationship between knowledge hiding and political acts suggesting that greater likelihood of experiencing knowledge hiding from co-workers’ triggers target employee to engage in political acts. Results also indicate that knowledge hiding increases ego depletion by expending one’s cognitive resources and in turn leads towards one’s moral disengagement. Finally, data also provided support for serial mediating effect of knowledge hiding on political acts through ego depletion and moral disengagement.
Ahmad et al. (Thu,) studied this question.