TOPIC 1 Differentiated empowering leadership refers to the varying behaviors that a leader engages in when distributing power and other job privileges differently to followers (Li et al., 2017a). MAIN IDEA When manifested within team settings, such behaviors may result in negative group outcomes, such as interpersonal conflict, tension, or animosity among team members (Sharma & Kirkman, 2015). As such, we need a comprehensive understanding of how empowering leadership manifests at multilevel and examine its effects on knowledge hiding within service organization. In our particular study, we examine both the individual-focused (at individual level) and differentiated empowering leadership (at team level) to understand the unique duallevel processes of empowering leadership on followers’ knowledge hiding behaviors. CONTRIBUTIONS We draw from social influence theories comprising the social exchange theory (Blau, 1964), social learning theory (Bandura, 1977), and social comparison theory (Festinger, 1954) to explain the causal mechanisms underlying the duallevel processes between empowering leadership and knowledge hiding in the team context. At individual level, empowering leader will act as a role model to share power and resources with followers and foster an open and trusting environment. Empowered followers will learn to be open-minded and feel psychologically safe to reciprocate the leader by decreasing knowledge hiding because it is harmful to the interests of the leader and the team. At the group level, when the leader exhibits differentiated empowering leadership, team members will experience differential treatment and will compare their level of empowerment against that of team members CONCLUSIONS Therefore, the leader’s behavior would foster feelings associated with “outgroup” versus “in-group”, which invariably creates relational conflict within the team and then resulting in knowledge hiding. In addition, in responding to the call for research that explores the boundary conditions of knowledge hiding (Connelly et al., 2019), we suggest that the emerging state of psychological safety (that is primed by individual-focused empowering leadership) serves as the mitigating context that reduces the influence of group relational conflict on knowledge hiding TOPIC 2 Knowledge hiding consists of three dimensions: evasive hiding, playing dumb, and rationalized hiding. Among the three dimensions, both playing dumb and evasive hiding involve deception in that the knowledge hider either pretends to not understand a request for information or provides incorrect or misleading information. MAIN IDEA Rationalized hiding, which is not necessarily deceptive, refers to the hider providing an explanation for refusing to offer the requested knowledge. Empowering leadership can promote knowledge sharing (Srivastava et al., 2006). Yet, the relationship between empowering leadership and knowledge hiding is unclear, given that knowledge hiding, and lack of knowledge sharing are different constructs (Connelly et al., 2012) CONTRIBUTIONS There is a need to understand how empowering leadership affects knowledge hiding. What is also equally important is to understand how empowering leadership manifests at individual level and group level to influence knowledge hiding. In their study on empowerment, Chen et al. (2007) suggests that further research is needed to investigate the dynamic interplay between each individual within a team and the team as a whole. CONCLUSIONS Research has shown that empowering leadership behaviors opérate at group as well as individual levels (Chen & Kanfer, 2006; Wu et al., 2010). For example, through leading by example behavior, leaders may target the group, whereas through coaching, participative decisionmaking, informing, and showing concern, they may target an individual. We adopt the construct of individual-focused empowering leadership to refer to the set of empowering behaviors that the leader exhibits to a targeted individual in a dyadic relationship between the leader and the follower. The social exchange relationship between the individual-focused empowering leader and the follower would suggest that the latter would not intentionally conceal or withhold knowledge when the leader and coworkers request information. When the leader coaches and shows concern, the follower is motivated to go beyond selfinterest and has little or no incentive to hide knowledge or valuable information TOPIC 3 Knowledge is a critical source of success, status, and power (Foucault, 1980; Townley, 1993). Through repeated social exchanges and social comparisons, followers who are less empowered and receive less autonomy in decision-making from the leader are more inclined to engage in hiding knowledge from team members. MAIN IDEA leader would also engage in knowledge hiding to remain more competitive than their peers because “knowledge is king” and is critical for work achievements. On one hand, empowering the follower can deepen the interpersonal relationship with leader and curb knowledge hiding; on the other hand, differentiated empowering leadership is detrimental to team member relationships and encourages knowledge hiding amongst group members CONTRIBUTIONS Differentiated empowering leadership captures variations in empowering leadership behaviors exhibited by the leader across team members in the group, which arose when leaders lead according to followers’ attributes (e.g., motivations and ability). For example, suppose a leader coaches certain team members more often than other members and allows some members to participate in decision-making more frequently than others. Then, differentiated empowering leadership invariably creates relational conflict within the group. Group relational conflict is “the perception among group members that there are interpersonal clashes characterized by anger, distrust, fear, frustration, and other forms of negative affect” (Pelled, 1996, p. 620). CONCLUSIONS For example, a customer service officer at the front desk of a firm who is empowered to implement a customer service improvement project may start instructing fellow customer service officers on tasks that they can and cannot perform and may even change their roles and responsibilities. Therefore, some team members are likely to experience negative feelings when interacting with others, which creates relational conflict among team members. Group relational conflict creates a lack of trust among team members, Conceptual Model. M. Lin, et al. International Journal of Hospitality Management 89 (2020) 1025403 and possibly even concerns that another member may cause harm on the individual. TOPIC 4 Psychological safety is a key mediator in the relationship between leadership behaviors and work outcomes. Psychological safety is a psychological state characterized by interpersonal trust and mutual respect, in which individuals feel comfortable to be themselves and engage in interpersonal risk taking (Edmondson, 1999). MAIN IDEA We suggest that individual-focused empowering leadership behaviors can shape follower’s psychological safety and in turn, affect knowledge hiding behaviors. For example, when an empowering leader gives the follower the opportunity to participate in decisionmaking, the follower will feel a sense of control over the work and of ownership of the work performed. CONTRIBUTIONS By fostering a psychologically safe context, the leader encourages the follower to feel free to exchange special knowledge and sensitive information without fear of negative consequences to status, self-image, or career. When follower feels psychologically safe, he/she does not feel the need to protect himself/herself by hiding knowledge because he/she is confident that the interpersonal relationships surrounding them are not threatening (Zhang et al., 2010). Therefore, the empowered follower who feels psychologically safe will not engage in knowledge hiding from not just the leader but also from the coworkers. Therefore, we propose: Hypothesis 4. Individual-focused empowering leadership is negatively related to the followers’ knowledge hiding through the follower’s psychological safety. CONCLUSIONS We hypothesized that follower’s psychological safety is engendered under empowering leaders. When follower experiences higher psychological safety, they will believe that team members respect each other’s competence, have positive intentions towards one another (Edmondson, 1999). The follower is more willing to hold judgment and separate information from emotions when experiencing relational conflict. Further, he/she is more open to acknowledging differences, prepared to find solutions at work, and spend more time on constructive problem solving. Therefore, he/ she is less inclined to engage in knowledge hiding despite the existence of group relational conflict since he/she is less concerned about negative interpersonal consequences. TOPIC 5 Data were collected from employees in 19 hotels in 10 cities in China. Empirical studies on knowledge hiding have mainly focused on knowledge-intensive industries. Hence, we collected data from hotels that have a rating of four stars and above because they are more likely to hire knowledge-based employees than hotels with lower star ratings. MAIN IDEA We used a convenient sampling procedure to select hotels and respondents. Human resources managers in 19 hotels helped us to distribute questionnaires to more than three employees in each department of the hotel. Each of these employees received a questionnaire and a return envelope, as well as a cover letter, which stated the rules regarding their voluntary participation in the survey, and a confidentiality guarantee, which confirmed that their information would not be shared with anyone in the hotel. CONTRIBUTIONS Empowering leadership consists of five dimensions (i.e., coaching, leading by example, informing, showing concern, and participative decision-making). In line with Wu et al. (2010), who categorized dimensions from transformational leadership scales into group and individual-focused components, we suggest that the same approach can be applied to empowering leadership scales. Leading by example is a groupfocused dimension since it is difficult for a leader to lead by example in different ways for different members in a group. CONCLUSIONS We adapted the dimensions of coaching, informing, participative decisionmaking,and showing concern as individual-focused empowering leadership. Sample items include “The department manager listens to employees’ ideas and suggestions” (participative decision-making), “provides help to employees” (coaching), “explains hotel goals to employees” (informing), and “shows concern for employees’ well-being” (showing concern). Cronbach’s alpha for the scale of individual-focused empowering leadership was 0.95 TOPIC 6 Differentiated empowering leadership is a grouplevel construct. We adopted Harrison and Klein’s (2007) method and used within-group coefficient of variation (CV) to measure differentiated empowering leadership (Li et al., 2017b; Wu et al., 2010) MAIN IDEA Specifically, we first collected data on individual-focused empowering leadership rated by hotel employees in 60 groups. Then, we calculated the within-group CVs of each group as the measurement of differentiated empowerment leadership. We calculated the standard deviations and the means of the scores of individual-focused empowering leadership for each group and then divided the within-group standard deviation by the mean of each group to produce the CV; the larger the CV value, the more the variation in individual-focused empowering leadership behavior perceived by the group members. TOPIC 7 Our study examined the influence of multilevel empowering leadership behaviors and its influence on knowledge hiding. We found support for most of our hypotheses. MAIN IDEA By taking a multilevel approach to explore the dynamics of empowering leadership behaviors on followers’ knowledge hiding, our study provides the empirical evidence to the dialectic nuance of empowerment: divergent treatment within the group will negate the positive influence of empowerment on individuals. CONTRIBUTIONS As a whole, individualfocused empowering leadership, differentiated empowering leadership, group relational conflict and follower’s psychological safety in the present study have similar effects on each of the three facets of knowledge hiding thus supporting knowledge hiding as a singular construct in our model. CONTRIBUTIONS The results show that empowering leadership behaviors that manifest at individual level (to a specific individual follower) and group level (within the team as a whole) are counterintuitive to conventional wisdom that empowering leadership is beneficial. CONCLUSIONS Discussion Our study examined the influence of multilevel empowering leadership behaviors and its influence on knowledge hiding. We found support for most of our hypotheses. First, individualfocused empowering leadership engenders follower’s psychological safety, which, in turn, dampens knowledge hiding. CONCLUSIONS Our findings underline the need to examine the interdependent effects of leadership behaviors— both at individual and group levels—and their effects on follower outcomes TOPIC 8 Drawing from social influence theories (i.e., social exchange, social learning, and social comparison theories), we introduce follower’s psychological safety and group relational conflict as the linking mechanisms between empowering leadership and knowledge hiding. TOPIC 9 our study examines the influence of empowering leadership at multilevel on followers’ knowledge hiding. MAIN IDEA Our findings show that individual-focused empowering leadership has indirect negative effects on followers’ knowledge hiding via follower’s psychological safety, whereas differentiated empowering leadership has indirect positive effects on followers’ knowledge hiding via group relational conflict. MAIN IDEA In examining dyadic relationships, employees will use various knowledge hiding tactics toward different subjects depending on mutual relationships. CONTRIBUTIONS Taken together, our study clarifies the inherent mechanisms of how empowering leadership impact knowledge hiding via the dual paths of follower’s psychological safety and group relational conflict. CONTRIBUTIONS Thus, it is possible that the three dimensions of knowledge hiding behaviors may manifest differentially depending on who are the perpetrators and targets of knowledge hiding. CONCLUSIONS Our study addresses the neutralizing effects of psychological safety on followers’ knowledge hiding when team members are experiencing relational conflict. When follower’s psychological safety is high, group relational conflict within the team has no impact on their knowledge hiding. Conversely, when follower’s psychological safety is low, group relational conflict’s positive effects on followers’ knowledge hiding is strengthened. CONCLUSIONS For example, in Zhao et al.’s (2016) study, workplace ostracism is an aggressive form of interactions and exchanges within the dyadic relationship where the ostracized employee will reciprocate with more antisocial form of knowledge hiding behaviors, i.e., evasive hiding and playing dump rather than rationalized hiding which is associated with more pro-social form of knowledge hiding (Zhao et al., 2016) towards the target. TOPIC 10 Managers should understand and recognize the detrimental effects of differentiated leadership behaviors within the team, especially leaders who attempt to differ and fit their empowering behaviors according to the followers’ characteristics. In the hospitality sector, service staffs are front-line service providers and they need to be empowered to accommodate customer requests and perform service recovery when problems occur. Leaders need to ensure that empowering leadership is an effective workplace practice for their followers. MAIN IDEA In the hospitality sector, service staffs are front-line service providers and they need to be empowered to accommodate customer requests and perform service recovery when problems occur. Leaders need to ensure that empowering leadership is an effective workplace practice for their followers. However, leaders are confronted with followers who possess differing capabilities and struggle to empower differentially among them appropriately. Leaders need to understand the effects of empowering leadership behaviors on individuals and on the team as a whole. Our findings reveal complex issues, given that individuals are a part of a team and are not isolated from one another. CONTRIBUTIONS By varying empowering practices amongst team members, it creates tension and conflict amongst team members which invariably will result in team members hiding information and solutions. Rather, leaders must adopt a cooperative approach focused on team goals. Instead of assessing performance of employees based on individual outcomes, leaders should incorporate performance assessment related to team outcomes. By focusing on collective goals rather than individual goals, leaders can preserve interpersonal harmony within the team and minimize relational conflict between team members. CONCLUSIONS By using a multilevel approach to examine the manifestation of empowering leadership in the workplace, we extend the understanding on the trade-offs of empowering leadership at individual and group levels. We provide initial evidence that although individual-focused empowering leadership results in the absence of followers’ knowledge hiding via psychological safety, a high level of differentiated empowering behaviors targeted at team members may produce group relational conflict, which, in turn, induces followers’ knowledge hiding. Moreover, follower’s psychological safety can buffer the accelerative effects of group relational conflict on their knowledge hiding.
