Drawing on a knowledge governance perspective and social cognitive theory, this study aims to develop a multilevel model to explain why and when exploitative supervision relates to graduate students’ knowledge hiding, with a focus on the mediating role of graduate students’ moral disengagement and the moderating role of moral identity internalization.
The data were collected from 463 full-time graduate students nested in 64 Shimen.
The multilevel analyses showed that exploitative supervision was positively related to graduate students’ knowledge hiding, and moral disengagement mediated this relationship. Moreover, both the relationship between exploitative supervision and moral disengagement and the indirect relationship with knowledge hiding were weaker among students with high moral identity internalization.
This study contributes to knowledge management research by examining how exploitative supervision is associated with graduate students’ knowledge hiding through moral disengagement. Moving beyond prior research that has largely examined knowledge hiding as an individual or interpersonal phenomenon, this study situates knowledge hiding within the Chinese Shimen context, a supervisor-centered and knowledge-intensive graduate training community. Specifically, the multilevel model shows that supervisor-level exploitative supervision is associated with student-level knowledge hiding through moral disengagement, and that this indirect relationship is weaker among students with high moral identity internalization.
