Narcissistic rivalry and admiration and knowledge hiding: mediating roles of emotional exhaustion and interpersonal trust

Drawing on threatened egoism theory, tournament theory and the extended agency model of narcissism, this paper aims to compare the effects of two different forms of grandiose narcissism of employees, namely, narcissistic rivalry (NR) and narcissistic admiration (NA), on knowledge hiding (HIDE), and investigate the potential mediating mechanism and boundary conditions.

Based on a three-wave survey of 296 participants recruited from six high-tech enterprises in China, the paper tests the proposed model by performing partial least squares structural equation modeling and a bias-corrected bootstrapping procedure.

The results indicate that NR facilitates knowledge hiding, while NA inhibits employees’ knowledge-hiding behavior. Emotional exhaustion plays a significant mediating role between NR and HIDE, and interpersonal trust negatively mediates the relationship between NA and HIDE. Moreover, interactional justice perception not only weakens the positive correlation between NR and emotional exhaustion but also weakens the indirect influence of NR on HIDE via emotional exhaustion. On the contrary, interactional justice perception strengthens the impact of NA on interpersonal trust, thus enhancing the mediating effect of NA on HIDE.

The present study expands the literature on knowledge management by addressing the underlying paradoxes of grandiose narcissistic employees’ HIDE behavior based on different connotations of narcissism and revealing the intervening mechanism with interactive justice perception as the moderator.