KNOWLEDGE HIDING BEHAVIORS ACROSS CULTURES: A COMPARATIVE STUDY BETWEEN CHINESE AND GERMAN AUTOMOTIVE KNOWLEDGE WORKERS THROUGH THE USE OF A SERIOUS GAME

Abstract

While knowledge sharing remains one of the primal objectives that organizations endeavor to achieve with every effort, the dominance of knowledge sharing studies in the academic world and the continuing interest among practitioners in figuring out efficient ways of amplifying knowledge sharing both indicate the abstruseness of this topic. More undesirably, organizational employees even hide what they know when they are requested for knowledge by coworkers. Knowledge hiding in organizations appears to impede knowledge sharing. However, simplifying the relationship between knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding will do no good to boost knowledge sharing and mitigate knowledge hiding in organizations, for they target different goals and are driven by different motivations. The current study addresses the inadequacy of investigating knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding in isolation and encompasses these two constructs into a same research framework to unveil the mechanism behind these seemingly opposite behaviors. By examining the extent to which organizational employees share what they know and the strategies they use to avoid making what they know available to others, the researcher aims to achieve a comprehensive insight into organizational employees’ behavioral features when coworkers request knowledge. Interpersonal factors, situational factors, and factors concerning the attribute of the requested knowledge were taken into account for their potential impact on knowledge workers’ responsive behavior. National culture was involved in the study and taken as a selection criterion when deciding on the sample source, for it shapes individuals’ mindsets and behaviors. Adopting a positivist position, this study employed a quasi-experimental design in the form of a serious game. Purposive sampling was used to access qualified participants from two automotive companies operating in China and Germany who fit the research purposes. Seventy-six knowledge workers from the Chinese automotive company and 187 from the German one represent the final sample. Testing the proposed hypotheses with SPSS, we found that Chinese (73.7%) and German (83.5%) knowledge workers demonstrated more sharing behavior than hiding in general. Further investigation into the extent to which they shared and the strategies they used to hide what they knew revealed that Chinese and German knowledge workers responded differently to requests for different types of knowledge made by different media and from different genders. Their different responses highlighted the usefulness of instant messaging to knowledge holders from both countries and the importance of relationships to which Chinese knowledge holders attached. Our findings suggest that a simple categorization of knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding is insufficient to decode organizational employees’ responses to colleagues’ knowledge requests. Gender differences in knowledge holders’ responses, the double-edged nature of instant messaging in the German work environment, and reluctance among Chinese knowledge holders to share their established relationships are worth the management’s due attention. In this study, the researcher extended the research scope of knowledge hiding by developing a research framework comprising both knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding and empirically tested it with two samples from two different countries. The innovative use of a serious game as the data collection approach represents another novelty of the research. As explorative research, this study demonstrated the usefulness of this method. It helped build up the grounds for future international management research, particularly those with socially undesirable behavior as the research focus.