ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Organizational Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1666321
Work-family interfaces and leaders' knowledge hiding: Underlying mechanisms and contingencies
Provisionally accepted
- 1Ningbo Polytechnic University, Ningbo, China
- 2Zhongkai University of Agriculture and Engineering, Guangzhou, China
- 3Ningbo University, Ningbo, China
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Objective: Drawing on the conservation of resources theory and the bidirectional nature of work-family interfaces, tThe current study aims to examine the effects of work interference with family (WIF) and family interference with work (FIW) on leaders' knowledge hiding, as well as the mediating role of affective organizational commitment and the contingent role of organization-based self-esteem. Method: Data from a sample of 137 new product team leaders in China were collected.Data were collected through a three-wave survey from 137 new product team leaders in China, with a two-week interval between waves to reduce common method bias. Results: Our findings indicated that FIW was positively related to knowledge hiding. This positive linkage was partially mediated by affective organizational commitment. Organization-based self-esteem weakens the negative impactweakened the effect of FIW on affective organizational commitment. In addition, as affective organizational commitment increased, the positive indirect effect of FIW on knowledge hiding becomes weakerdecreased.. By contrast, the relevant results related to the effect of WIF were not significant. Conclusion: Extant research on micro-innovation has mainly highlighted the within-domain stressful effects of job conflicts but largely neglected theirits cross-domain mechanisms in shaping leaders' knowledge behaviors. This study is one of the first to investigate how and when work-family interfaces influence top-down knowledge-hiding behavior. Practically, the findings provide guidance for organizations to design family-supportive and esteem-enhancing HR practices to reduce leaders' knowledge hiding driven by FIW.
Keywords: Work-family conflicts, Affective organizational commitment, self-esteem, Knowledge hiding, Innovative team leader, Conservation of resources theory
Received: 15 Jul 2025; Accepted: 15 Oct 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Min, Fang, Zhang 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: Kai Fang, minmin0812@163.com
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