Team of champions or champion team? : the roles of knowledge hiding and psychological entitlement

Černe, Matej (author), Hirst, Giles (author), Bogilović, Sabina (author), Štrumbelj, Erik (author), Zhang, Pengcheng (author)

Drawing on social comparison theory, we propose that when highly creative employees compare themselves to others, they are more likely to develop a sense of entitlement seeking to preserve their superiority by hiding their knowledge. This obstructs the team innovation process, particularly within the context of a competitive climate. We tested our hypotheses in two multimethod studies. The first, a two-wave field study of 286 Chinese employees in 66 teams, included employee, supervisor, and manager data. The second, experimental study comprised 209 undergraduate students placed into 44 teams in a European university. The analyses of both studies were based on an innovative methodological approach with Bayesian estimation that allowed us to split variance between individual and team levels, thereby modeling the bottom-up emergence processes more accurately. We found that individual creativity positively predicts psychological entitlement, which is in turn related to knowledge hiding. In turn, psychological entitlement and knowledge hiding impede team innovation.

• Language: English
• Keywords: management, personnel, knowledge management, knowledge transfer, creativity, innovation, knowledge hiding, psychological entitlement, competitive climate, bottom-up emergence
• Work type: Article
• Typology: 1.01 - Original Scientific Article
• Organization: EF - School of Economics and Business; FU - Faculty of Administration; FRI - Faculty of Computer and Information Science
• Publication status: Published
• Publication version: Version of Record
• Year: 2025
• Number of pages: 17 str.
• Numbering: Vol. 186, art. 115001
• PID: 20.500.12556/RUL-163988
• UDC: 331.108
• ISSN on article: 0148-2963
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jbusres.2024.115001
• COBISS.SI-ID: 211397123
• Publication date in RUL: 15.10.2024

Record is a part of a journal

• Title: Journal of business research
• Shortened title: J. bus. res.
• Publisher: Elsevier
• ISSN: 0148-2963
• COBISS.SI-ID: 25694208

Licences

• License: CC BY-NC 4.0, Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International
• Link: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/
• Description: A creative commons license that bans commercial use, but the users don’t have to license their derivative works on the same terms.

Secondary language

• Language: Slovenian
• Keywords: management, kadri, obvladovanje znanja, prenos znanja