Abstract
With increasing number of organizations experiencing organizational crises because of layoff and other forms of restructuring, the psychological threat of losing job is high among employees. During organizational crises such as layoffs employees experience resource scarcity and increased workload. In order to sustain in such uncertain environment, employees’ resort to various survival tactics such as knowledge hiding. Knowledge hiding causes various adverse consequences for the organizations, and the research on knowledge hiding is limited. Drawing on resource scarcity framework and frustration-aggression hypothesis, we developed a conceptual framework to examine the factors leading to knowledge hiding behavior. We collected data from 304 employees working in IT industry in India. The study presents evidence for the mediating role of conflict and organizational incivility on the relationship between perceived organizational politics and knowledge hiding. Our study provides an important contribution by explaining the comprehensive mechanism leading to knowledge hiding in organizations.