Leader Narcissism and Employee Knowledge Management Behavior: The Roles of Employees' Trust in Management and Power Distance Orientation

Leader Narcissism And Employee Knowledge Management Behavior The Roles Of Employees’ Trust In Management And Power Distance Orientation

In today’s dynamic market economy, knowledge management is crucial for fostering employee innovation and enhancing organizational performance (Darroch, 2005; Rhee & Choi, 2017). In particular, employees’ knowledge management behaviors are vital for organizational progress and competitiveness (Khalid et al., 2018). Consequently, effective management of these behaviors has become a significant topic. Knowledge management involves the deliberate practice of disseminating, concealing, or modifying knowledge and experience within an organization (Braun, 2017). Despite organizations’ efforts to promote positive knowledge management activities (Wang & Noe, 2010), the success of such efforts is often influenced by various internal factors (Butt & Ahmad, 2019). Given the frequent interactions between employees and supervisors, it is essential to understand how leaders’ traits impact employees’ knowledge management behaviors (Braun et al., 2018).

Previous research has extensively documented the relationship between leader narcissism and employee behavior (Hoffman et al., 2013). For example, leader narcissism has been found to decrease employees’ voice and increase employees’ uncertainty (Kim et al., 2021; Zhang et al., 2023). However, little research has focused on the relationship between leader narcissism and employee knowledge management behaviors. Leaders have the authority to allocate critical resources and evaluate employees (Hirst et al., 2016). Leader traits should play an important role in explaining employees’ tactical choices involving knowledge (Biswas & Chakraborty, 2022). Therefore, it is necessary to investigate how and why leader narcissism influences employee knowledge management.

Accordingly, this study aims to explore how leader narcissism can influence employees’ knowledge management behaviors. Specifically, it is proposed that leader narcissism is positively related to knowledge manipulation and hiding and negatively related to employee knowledge sharing behavior. Employee trust in management mediates the relationship between leader narcissism and employee knowledge management behaviors. It is also proposed that power distance orientation moderates the relationship between leader narcissism and employee trust in management (Sanders et al., 2021). A questionnaire survey was conducted to test these hypotheses.

This study has the following theoretical contributions. First, it fills a gap in prior research by proposing that leader narcissism is positively related to knowledge manipulation and hiding and negatively related to employee knowledge sharing behavior (Pan et al., 2018). Leaders play a very important role in organizations, and leader narcissism has been shown to be a significant predictor of employee behavior in organizations (Steffens & Haslam, 2022). In this study, the previous discussion is extended, and it is proposed that leader narcissism is a key antecedent of different employee knowledge management behaviors because it influences how individuals respond to knowledge sharing dilemmas (Zhang et al., 2023). By expanding upon prior research findings, this study provides a convincing explanation for the connection between leader narcissism and employees’ knowledge management behaviors.

Second, by introducing employees’ trust in management as the mediator, this study unveils the underlying mechanism through which leader narcissism impacts employee outcomes. This study thus echoes Ellen et al.’s (2019) call for more studies examining the mediating mechanisms through which leader narcissism impacts employee outcomes. The proposed mediating mechanism provides a new perspective (i.e., employee attitudes toward management−employee relationships) to understand how leader narcissism leads to adverse outcomes.