In partial fulfilment of the requirements of the Degree of bachelor of arts in business administration

Abstract

The study aims to explore which individual psychological factors influence emotional exhaustion via knowledge hiding, thereby giving some suggestions for those as knowledge hiders to avoid such knowledge hiding and to avoid emotional exhaustion in the workplace. The research will use Psychological Ownership of Knowledge (POK) and Conservation of Resource (COR) as two main theories to theoretically support the hypotheses in the model. The quantitative method has been applied in the study and the survey respondents were around 400 who have already entered the labour market. The collected data was analysed using 3 common methods (descriptive statistics, PLS SEM, and bootstrapping). The study has shown that psychological entitlement and moral disengagement both positively influence knowledge hiding, whilst psychological safety negatively influences knowledge hiding. There is also enough evidence to show that knowledge hiding positively leads to emotional exhaustion. Moreover, the results have suggested that all listed independent factors influence emotional exhaustion via knowledge hiding. Apart from contributing to background theories POK and COR, the study also explores the mediating mechanism of knowledge hiding, thereby practically helping managers and subordinates in the workplace to understand how these negative thoughts listed above can result in emotional exhaustion via knowledge hiding. After this theoretical contribution, there should be some change in building human resource strategies to help both mangers and subordinates work satisfactorily soon.