When the victims fight back: the influence of workplace ostracism on employee knowledge sabotage behavior
Abstract
Purpose
This study aims to investigate the negative interpersonal antecedents, emotional mediators and boundary conditions of knowledge sabotage behavior.
Design/methodology/approach
The authors collected data from 275 Chinese employees using convenience sampling and snowball sampling across three stages. Subsequently, the authors used both hierarchical regression and bootstrap methods to test the proposed hypotheses.
Findings
The results confirmed that workplace ostracism has positive effects on employee knowledge sabotage behavior both directly and via employee anger. In addition, the authors found that employee bottom-line mentality (BLM) moderates not only the direct effect of workplace ostracism on employee anger but also the indirect effect of employee anger in this context. Employee conscientiousness moderates only the direct effect of workplace ostracism on employee anger and does not moderate the indirect effect.
Originality/value
To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this study not only explores the influence of workplace ostracism on employee knowledge sabotage behavior for the first time but also elucidates the underlying emotional mechanisms (anger) and boundary conditions (employee BLM and conscientiousness) by which workplace ostracism influences employee knowledge sabotage behavior, thus deepening the understanding of how knowledge sabotage emerges in organizations.
Keywords
Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank the anonymous reviewers and editors for their valuable opinions and comments, it is these comments that improve the quality of our articles.
The authors acknowledge the financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (Grant No.71673082), Hunan Province Graduate Research Innovation Project (Grant No. QL20230110).
Declarations.
Conflict of interest: Zhihong Tan, Ling Yuan, Junli Wang and Qunchao Wan declare that they have no conflict of interest.
Explanation of adding the fourth author: In response to Comment 1 from Reviewer 1, Qunchao Wan has developed feasible measures and searched for a lot of information; Regarding the Comment 1 from Reviewer 1, Qunchao Wan provided many suggestions and helped write a partial literature review. Therefore, we have added Qunchao Wan as the fourth author.
Citation
Tan, Z., Yuan, L., Wang, J. and Wan, Q. (2024), "When the victims fight back: the influence of workplace ostracism on employee knowledge sabotage behavior", Journal of Knowledge Management, Vol. ahead-of-print No. ahead-of-print. https://doi.org/10.1108/JKM-04-2023-0303
Publisher
:Emerald Publishing Limited
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