IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/a/taf/servic/v45y2025i2p161-179.html
   My bibliography  Save this article

Leaders’ knowledge hiding and front-line employee service sabotage

Author

Listed:
  • Salman Zulfiqar
  • Thomas Garavan
  • Chunhui Huo
  • Muhammad Waheed Akhtar
  • Binesh Sarwar

Abstract

Purpose: Utilizing social learning theory, this paper investigates a theoretical model that links knowledge hiding by leaders to employee service sabotage via moral disengagement (MD). It also investigates an important boundary condition by analyzing the role of leader-member exchange on both leaders’ knowledge hiding-moral disengagement (relationship) and on the overall indirect relationship between leaders’ knowledge hiding (LKH) and front-line service sabotage (SS). Utilizing a three-wave research design, data were collected using a structured questionnaire from 265 employees working in the service sector. The results reveal strong support for the proposed moderated mediation model. Leaders’ knowledge hiding is a strong significant predictor of employees’ service sabotage directly and via moral disengagement. We found that leader-member exchange accentuated the association between leaders’ knowledge hiding and moral disengagement in addition to accentuating the mediated relationship. The study enhances our understanding of the consequences of leaders’ knowledge hiding for service and, in particular, service sabotage. The study is one of the few to investigate leader as opposed to employee knowledge hiding in service organizations. The findings highlight that service organizations need to take proactive stems to minimize the hiding of knowledge by leaders because of its determinant consequences for service sabotage.

Suggested Citation

  • Salman Zulfiqar & Thomas Garavan & Chunhui Huo & Muhammad Waheed Akhtar & Binesh Sarwar, 2025. "Leaders’ knowledge hiding and front-line employee service sabotage," The Service Industries Journal, Taylor & Francis Journals, vol. 45(2), pages 161-179, January.
  • Handle: RePEc:taf:servic:v:45:y:2025:i:2:p:161-179
    DOI: 10.1080/02642069.2023.2180499
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: http://hdl.handle.net/10.1080/02642069.2023.2180499
    Download Restriction: Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.1080/02642069.2023.2180499?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    As the access to this document is restricted, you may want to search for a different version of it.

    More about this item

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:taf:servic:v:45:y:2025:i:2:p:161-179. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Chris Longhurst (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.tandfonline.com/FSIJ20 .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.