What Influences Knowledge Hoarding in Postgraduate Students? An Empirical Research in Universities

As Knowledge Management (KM) studies evolve, concerns regarding counterproductive sharing behaviors such as withholding, hiding or hoarding knowledge have emerged. Despite attempts by researchers and practitioners to understand what motivates people to share knowledge and organizations adjusting their practices to enhance Knowledge Sharing (KS), there is still a need to understand the undesired behaviors that negatively influence efficacy in diverse organizational contexts. Knowledge Hoarding (KH) cannot be considered the opposite of KS. Nevertheless, it does not contribute positively to KS. The study aims to investigate if well-known intrinsic and extrinsic KS motivators - enjoyment in helping others and reputation - help reduce Knowledge Hoarding. Higher education institutions are knowledge intensive and therefore constitute an important environment to research KH. For this purpose, a survey was applied to postgraduate students (master's and Ph.Ds.) attending public and private universities in Brazil. Following snowball sampling, the valid responses, from 295 students, were analyzed using Structural Equation Modelling (SEM). Two perspectives were considered in this research - the student's perspective related to own hoarding behavior and their perception regarding colleagues' hoarding behavior. In terms of intrinsic KS motivation, our results indicate the more the students enjoy helping others, the less they tend towards hoarding behavior. On the other hand, the KS extrinsic motivator `reputation' demonstrated inverse influence on student knowledge hoarding behavior, suggesting there is a perception that by retaining some part of their knowledge, exclusive, they will enhance their reputation. Another finding from this research concerns the high influence of the behavior of others on a student's own behavior, i.e. when the student perceives his/her colleagues hoard knowledge, he/she will also hoard. Although enjoyment in helping others and reputation are significantly related with KH, they explain a very small part of KH variance. As future research, the authors suggest conducting qualitative research in order to identify the KH barriers.