Team of champions or champion team? The roles of knowledge hiding and psychological entitlement

Abstract

Drawing on social comparison theory, we propose that when highly creative employees compare themselves to others, they are more likely to develop a sense of entitlement seeking to preserve their superiority by hiding their knowledge. This obstructs the team innovation process, particularly within the context of a competitive climate. We tested our hypotheses in two multimethod studies. The first, a two-wave field study of 286 Chinese employees in 66 teams, included employee, supervisor, and manager data. The second, experimental study comprised 209 undergraduate students placed into 44 teams in a European university. The analyses of both studies were based on an innovative methodological approach with Bayesian estimation that allowed us to split variance between individual and team levels, thereby modeling the bottom-up emergence processes more accurately. We found that individual creativity positively predicts psychological entitlement, which is in turn related to knowledge hiding. In turn, psychological entitlement and knowledge hiding impede team innovation.