Impacts of cooperative and competitive personalities on tacit knowledge sharing among Chinese employees

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to study the influence of cooperative and competitive personalities on tacit knowledge sharing (TKS) by exploring the mediating role of organizational identification (OI) and the moderating role of perceived organizational support (POS) among Chinese employees. Design/methodology/approach Conducting a network survey of ordinary employees from Chinese listed companies (2019) as the research objects, the authors collect 298 valid samples for research. The authors apply confirmatory factor analysis to test the reliability and validity of the constructs, structural equation modeling to verify the direct effect and the PROCESS macro to test the mediating and moderating effects. Findings The results show that there is a positive relationship between cooperative personality (COP) and TKS, and there is an inverted U-shaped relationship between competitive personality (CMP) and TKS. OI plays a mediating role between COP and TKS, while POS plays a negative moderating role between COP and TKS. Research limitations/implications This paper only takes Chinese employees as the research sample, and future research can make a cross-cultural comparison between the impacts of cooperative and competitive personalities on employees’ behaviors. Practical implications The results of this study suggest that enterprises should actively cultivate the COP of employees, and managers should refrain from intervening in the behaviors of employees with COP. At the same time, for employees with CMP, managers should guide them to control their competitive tendency at a reasonable level. The conclusions of this paper also suggest that managers should pay attention to the cultivation of employees’ OI. Originality/value This study plugs the gap in research on the impacts of cooperative and competitive personalities on TKS. It makes a contribution to the research development of COP and CMP and their influence mechanisms on employees’ behaviors. In addition, the negative moderating effect of POS on COP–TKS link verifies the correctness of Y theory. Studying the relationships among personality traits (cooperative and competitive personalities), cognition (OI) and behaviors (TKS), this paper makes a contribution to such a research stream.

Rewards and knowledge sharing in the CoPS development context: the moderating role of transformational leadership

“…Studies have suggested the favorable outcomes of KS, such as improving individual innovative behavior (Vandavasi et al , 2020; Nan and Arunyaphum, 2021) and organizational performance (Oyemomi et al , 2016). Accordingly, scholars have also investigated antecedents of KS, such as personality traits (Zhang et al , 2022), personal power (Issac et al , 2022), individual motivations (Nguyen et al , 2019) and leadership (Nan and Arunyaphum, 2021; Lei et al , 2021a). Among the antecedents of KS, identifying KS motivations has been one of the mainstreams in the KS literature (Nguyen et al , 2022b).…”

Modeling the influence of individual differences on knowledge hiding

“…Understanding the drive factors of knowledge hiding and their interplay over time remains a significant agenda for researchers (Connelly et al,2012;Peng, 2013;Zhang et al, 2021a). To overcome the limitation of cross-sectional data and better explore the impact mechanism of individual differences on knowledge hiding, we refer to Wong et al (2019) and Zhang et al (2022), and develop three dynamic models, namely, fixed model with individual factors not affected by situational factors; continuous model with individual factors continuously affected by situational factors and interacting model with individual factors affected by the interaction between situational factors and individual factors.…”

“…Therefore, we believe that the relationship between individual differences and knowledge hiding also changes over time under situational factors. To date, the longitudinal effects of individual differences on knowledge-hiding behavior in different situations remain an unexplored subject area (Zhang et al , 2021a), and it is unclear how individual factors produce knowledge hider over time. In particular, previous research models tend to be limited to a specific time point and largely essentially ignore the influence of situational factors on individual behavior.…”

Unraveling the relationship between workplace dignity and employees’ tacit knowledge sharing: the role of proactive motivation

“…4.2.5 Control variables. Prior empirical investigations examining antecedent of knowledge sharing suggest that employees' level education, age, gender and job tenure have the potential to influence employees' knowledge sharing behaviour (Lin, 2007;Yin et al, 2020;Zhang et al, 2022). Therefore, these characteristics were considered as control variables in this study to capture the true effect of workplace dignity and underlying mechanisms on employee TKS.…”