Knowledge hiding and social exchange theory: a systematic review and meta-analysis
verifiedrich profile · Frontiers in Psychology · 2025
Zhang, Zijun; Takahashi, Yoshi; Rezwan, Roksana Binte
How this was studied
A meta-analytic synthesis — it pools many primary studies rather than running a single design, so there is no single-study diagram.
What this article reports
The findings we extracted from this work, normalized into Principia’s relationship form (X → Y). Each feeds the synthesized models below.
organizational justice → knowledge hiding
team member exchange → knowledge hiding
workplace incivility → knowledge hiding
workplace deviance → knowledge hiding
Models this article informs
The meta-analytic priors this article contributes evidence to — its place in the broader synthesis.
abusive supervision correlates knowledge hiding
organizational justice correlates knowledge hiding
team member exchange correlates knowledge hiding
workplace deviance correlates knowledge hiding
workplace incivility correlates knowledge hiding
In the authors’ words
The article’s own abstract.
The literature on the antecedents and consequences of knowledge hiding remains fragmented, limiting its practical applications. Social exchange theory (SET), one of the most widely adopted sociological frameworks, offers unique insights into the dynamics of knowledge hiding. This study synthesizes the application of SET in analyzing the nomological framework of knowledge hiding through a systematic literature review and meta-analysis. A meta-analysis was conducted based on the random-effects model and the meta-analytic structural equation modeling method, incorporating 66 primary studies with a total of 20,603 participants. Additionally, we examined the mediating role of knowledge hiding by linking key antecedents and consequences. Moreover, an exploratory analysis was conducted to investigate the moderating effects of national culture and research methodology, providing evidence to justify the true heterogeneity in the pairwise relationships between knowledge hiding and its antecedents. The research results generally support most pairwise relationships between knowledge hiding and its correlates, which were theoretically developed based on SET. This study is the first attempt to explore the explanatory power of SET in analyzing the knowledge-hiding phenomenon, and whether the establishment of a knowledge exchange loop contributes to a deeper understanding of this dyadic construct.
What the literature says about it
Attributed, open-access quotes from other works that cite this article, plus the citation-graph verdict tally. Corroborations and disputes, in one place — the honest-broker view.
No open-access quotations have been captured yet.
Assembled from Principia’s registry — bibliographic record, extracted effect sizes, the models they inform, and open-access citing literature.