Abstract
The intention of employees to leave can lead to increased operational costs and cause disruptions, potentially jeopardizing an organization's competitive position and ability to achieve its strategic goals. While the issue of knowledge hiding is commonly recognized as a significant problem affecting employee departure, the specific patterns of knowledge hiding within organizations and its direct influence on employees' turnover intentions have yet to be thoroughly explored. Therefore, this paper aims to examine the relationship between the supervisor’s knowledge hiding behaviors and employees’ turnover intention, with a particular focus on the mediating effect of proxy efficacy. More precisely, it is hypothesized that supervisors’ knowledge hiding actions by evasive hiding and playing dumb will positively influence employee turnover intention via proxy efficacy, whereas behaviors of rationalized hiding are not anticipated to exacerbate turnover intentions. Additionally, this research introduces the concept of psychological distance to examine the role of employee structural empowerment in mitigating the adverse impacts of supervisors' knowledge hiding behaviors on employees' proxy efficacy. We conducted a preliminary study involving 58 participants from high-knowledge industries. The findings demonstrate that supervisors' knowledge hiding behaviors are associated with proxy efficacy, with the latter significantly influencing the employees' turnover intention. Furthermore, employee structural empowerment diminishes the negative impact of supervisors' knowledge hiding on proxy efficacy. Notably, of all knowledge hiding behaviors examined, only the act of playing dumb by supervisors directly influenced employees' turnover intentions. This study endeavors to provide a detailed examination of the interactions between the knowledge hiding behaviors of supervisors, the perceptions of employees, and their consequent turnover intentions, thereby offering valuable insights for scholars and practitioners.