The implications of knowledge hiding at work for recovery after work: A diary study

Past research on at-work predictors of after-work recovery mainly focused on what happened to someone at work. Yet, employees also act at work, and their own behavior and its consequences likely affect their ability to recover as well. Based on this premise, we bring together recovery research and research on moral behavior in organizations, examining the intrapersonal consequences of knowledge hiding, the intentional attempt to withhold knowledge that others have requested, for employee recovery. Specifically, we propose that knowledge hiding poses a moral dilemma, and thus has both positive (lower exhaustion) and negative (lower performance) intraindividual consequences that represent two opposing pathways to recovery in terms of work-related remorse in the evening and vigor the next morning. To test our hypotheses, we conducted a diary study across ten workdays, analyzing 517 daily reports from 152 participants. The results of multilevel path modeling suggest that day-specific knowledge hiding (in the form of playing dumb) can have both good (i.e., saving energy resources) and bad (i.e., low immediate performance) outcomes that cancel each other out in predicting evening work-related remorse. Evening remorse was negatively related to next-morning vigor. By considering how employees’ remorse affects their knowledge hiding, we meaningfully extend recovery research, showing that employees’ reflections on their own actions affect their post-work recovery processes and outcomes.