Paradoxical behavior toward innovation: Knowledge sharing, knowledge hiding, and career sustainability interactions

The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated advance of digital technologies, resulting in unconventional innovation challenges for companies and novel, digital-based types of gig workers. Considering this phenomenon and its huge impact on employees' career development patterns and innovative work behavior (IWB), this research investigates how gig workers' perceived career sustainability affects their post-pandemic IWB. A critical feature of gig work is breaking traditional boundaries of working time and space, which often causes paradoxes disrupting traditional modes of knowledge exchange at work. Accordingly, this study is anchored theoretically in an exploration of how interacting mechanisms caused by two primary knowledge exchange behaviors, knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding, affect employee IWB from a paradoxical perspective of yin–yang harmonizing. Data from quantitative and qualitative studies were collected from China's cross-border e-commerce enterprises, which mainly target North American and European markets. The results indicate a nonlinear relationship between career sustainability and IWB. The interaction of knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding relates significantly to IWB, with the interaction moderating the U-shaped career sustainability–IWB relationship that was detected. Our study also carries valuable theoretical and practical implications that indicate that job flexibility and information and communications technology (ICT) can favor knowledge exchange, through knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding interaction, in proportion to the degree of career sustainability. The study also suggests a need to adopt organizational sharing strategies capable of spreading a work culture based on results, in which global companies can confront perplexing employment situations more effectively, thus promoting innovation.