Exploring Distrust, Paranoia, Knowledge Hiding and Abusive Supervision Over Time

Previous research has demonstrated that deviant workplace behaviors lead to more workplace deviance. Focusing specifically on knowledge hiding and abusive supervision, this paper explores the reciprocal relationships between these two types of workplace deviance over three time periods to assess whether abusive supervision leads to knowledge hiding or whether knowledge hiding elicits abuse. Further, we explore how abusive supervision leads to a cycle of distrust and paranoia that elicits knowledge hiding. The results offer support for a reciprocal relationship between abusive supervision and knowledge hiding. Abusive supervision predicts all facets of knowledge hiding over 7 months. Although knowledge hiding only predicts abuse over 3.5 months, the behavior persists over time, suggesting that knowledge hiding might be an effective response to abusive supervision. Additionally, the relationships between abusive supervision and evasive hiding, and abusive supervision and playing dumb, are mediated by perceptions of distrust and paranoia. The results add to our understanding of how knowledge hiding spreads in organizations and point to a cycle of workplace deviance that is hard to break.