ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1627999
When Robot Knocks, Knowledge Locks: How and When Does AI Awareness Affect Employee Knowledge Hiding?
Provisionally accepted
- Shanghai University, Shanghai, China
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Artificial Intelligence (AI) technologies are fundamentally reshaping organizational knowledge management practices. Drawing upon the Conservation of Resources Theory and the Social Identity Theory, this study investigates how AI awareness influences employees' knowledge hiding behavior, while examining the mediating role of psychological availability and the moderating effect of personorganization fit. Based on survey data collected from 311 employees across multiple industries in China, and analyzed using SPSS 27.0, PROCESS 4.0 and Amos 29.0, it was found that AI awareness is positively associated with knowledge hiding. This relationship is partially mediated by psychological availability and moderated by person-organization fit. The findings suggest that when deploying AI technologies, organizations must not only emphasize technical efficiency but also cultivate employees' positive cognitive evaluations of AI. Furthermore, fostering an organizational culture with high person-organization value congruence appears to offer a promising avenue for mitigating knowledge hiding and enhancing knowledge sharing. This study advances the literature on the antecedents of employee knowledge behaviors under conditions of technological transformation. It provides novel empirical evidence that AI awareness influences knowledge hiding via psychological availability and identifies person-organization fit as a critical boundary condition shaping this mechanism.
Keywords: artificial intelligence, Knowledge hiding, AI awareness, Psychological availability, person-organization fit
Received: 13 May 2025; Accepted: 23 Jun 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Liu, Lin, Tu and Xu. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Xin Xu, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China
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