Assessing the relationship between technostress and knowledge hiding—a moderated mediation model

Almost every aspect of a person's daily life is impacted by information and communication technologies (ICTs), and some unfavorable outcomes like technostress have been noticed. In this study, we examine how technostress affects knowledge hiding. Drawing from the energy-consuming characteristic of technostress and prior research on how technostress affects ICT users, this article builds and tests a model that takes work exhaustion as a mediator and explored the moderating role of job autonomy. To test our conceptual model, we examined the responses to a survey questionnaire submitted by 287 ICT users from multiple organizations. Using structural equation modeling, we found that technostress increases employees' knowledge hiding behavior, and work exhaustion partially mediates technostress and knowledge hiding, while job autonomy only moderates the relationship between technostress and work exhaustion when the fourth factor of technological stress, techno-insecurity, is excluded. We also discuss future research directions and implications of the results.