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

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 th...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of business research 2025-01, Vol.186, p.115001, Article 115001
Main Authors: Černe, Matej, Hirst, Giles, Bogilović, Sabina, Štrumbelj, Erik, Zhang, Pengcheng
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Bottom-up emergence
Competitive climate
Creativity
Innovation
Knowledge hiding
Psychological entitlement
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Summary: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.
ISSN:0148-2963
DOI:10.1016/j.jbusres.2024.115001