THE HIDDEN FACTORS BEHIND KNOWLEDGE CONCEALMENT:

A REVIEW-BASED FRAMEWORK

Abstract

Organizational knowledge management fosters innovation, decision-making, continuous learning, and competitiveness. This can be readily accomplished in an organization through employee knowledge sharing. On the contrary, knowledge concealment among employees has emerged as a significant impediment to an organization's ongoing growth and survival. This phenomenon has clear detrimental repercussions on organizations by stifling creativity, obstructing teamwork and collaboration, and ultimately impacting organizational performance. This paper explores the hidden factors of knowledge concealment namely internal competition, lack of rewards in knowledge sharing, psychological entitlement, leadership, and moral disengagement. Although many studies have methodically scrutinized the issue of knowledge concealment, they are insufficient as most had focused on the consequences rather than the factors. This research addresses the gap by examining the numerous factors influencing knowledge concealment in organizations through the literature review. The findings of the literature review indicate that these factors have consistently demonstrated strong associations with knowledge concealment in previous studies. In addition, this study introduces a fresh conceptual framework that analyzes the hidden factors of knowledge concealment, offering opportunities for future research.