Introduction
Political decisions are behaviors that are not foreseen in the job description of an individual and that an individual attempts to influence others by relying on them. In political decisions, the goal of influencing is to use others or organizational decisions to advance personal interests. Other definitions of political behavior in organizations have been presented. Despite all the differences in definitions, there is one thing in common among most of them: The goal of political behavior is to secure personal interests. According to Robbins, people learn very early that in the organizational environment, there is no such thing as “truth” and “reality” and most of what exists is interpretation.
Research Question(s)
What is the mediating role of knowledge hiding between organizational political decisions and innovation among faculty members and administrators of the Islamic Azad University, Naraq Branch?
Literature Review
Performance improvement, loyalty, companionship, and compassion are all subjective concepts that lack clear, objective measures. For this reason, many people quickly learn that the image of working is more important than doing it, and this can be the starting point for political decisions in the organization. Organizational policies are commonplace, logical, and useful. If you try to stay away from politics in your workplace, your job will definitely suffer. Selfish behavior, individualism, and bad organizational policies are factors that lead to the formation of knowledge hiding and ultimately encourage it, in addition to affecting innovation and creativity. Knowledge management plays an important role in any organization that can affect the performance of companies and employees. However, achieving satisfactory results in knowledge management is often challenging due to the practice of knowledge hiding” Research has shown that employees are reluctant to share knowledge for reasons such as protecting and controlling knowledge ownership, mastery, expertise, and defensive awareness. About half of employees intend to withhold, mislead, or conceal knowledge that has been requested by someone else. This behavior of not consciously providing needed knowledge to colleagues when requested is called knowledge hiding, which has become an independent concept that is different from the opposite of knowledge sharing. It is obvious that knowledge hiding is likely to reduce the efficiency of knowledge exchange among members, prevent the generation of new ideas/thoughts or even destroy trust, increase the risk of knowledge loss, and inhibit the creativity of individuals and teams. In this regard, solving the problem of insufficient knowledge sharing by eliminating knowledge hiding makes sense, facilitating knowledge transformation in organizations. Many studies have been conducted on knowledge hiding, all of which are valuable and applicable. There are many findings on the mediating role of antecedent variables that influence knowledge hiding. Emotional and cognitive factors (e.g., leadership, workplace stressors, interpersonal relationships, personality traits, and psychological ownership) can cause knowledge hiding.
Methodology
In this regard, 184 faculty members and professors of the Islamic Azad University, Naraq Branch, as a census sampling, were selected as a sample. The data were collected using five-item Likert questionnaires of 12-item organizational political decisions by Kacmar and Ferris (1991), three-item knowledge hiding by Serenko and Bontis (2016), 13-item creativity and innovation of people, Zhou and George (2001), and 5-item professional commitment by Chang and Choi (2007), Collection and hypotheses were analyzed using structural equation method and Sobel test and using Amos software. Finally, according to the theoretical foundations, the following hypotheses were considered: Hypothesis 1) Organizational political decisions have a positive effect on knowledge hiding. Hypothesis 2) Knowledge hiding has a negative effect on innovation. Hypothesis 3) Organizational political decisions have a negative effect on innovation. Hypothesis 4) Professional commitment moderates the relationship between organizational political decisions and knowledge hiding.
Results
Hypotheses 1 to 3 were tested using the macro process developed by Hayes (2013) with 184 bootstrap samples. All proposed relationships between constructs were significant at the 0.01 alpha level. Therefore, according to the third hypothesis: organizational political decisions have a significant negative effect on employee innovation (β = -0.43, T = 13.24, P < 0.01). The second hypothesis is that knowledge hiding has a significant negative effect on individual innovation (β = -0.31, T = 8.35, P < 0.01). In the first hypothesis, organizational political decisions have a significant positive direct effect on knowledge hiding (β = 0.43, T = 11.35, P < 0.01). And finally, according to the fourth hypothesis: Professional commitment directly has a significant negative effect on organizational political decisions (-0.12) and indirectly and negatively affects knowledge hiding (-0.055). The results also further show that knowledge hiding moderates the relationship between organizational political decisions and employee innovation.
Discussion
The main objective of the study is to investigate the relationships between organizational political decisions, knowledge hiding and innovation and also to examine the moderating role of professional commitment in the relationship between knowledge hiding and organizational political decisions. Organizational politics involves direct and indirect interaction tactics and power struggles. In general, politics is an important part of any organization that must be managed properly. Organizational commitment is influenced by their perception of organizational politics. For example: “Pay and promotion policies” affect organizational commitment. “Public political behavior” showed a positive effect on organizational commitment. Therefore, this study showed that organizational political decisions predict and affect knowledge hiding positively/directly and, in turn, innovation negatively/directly. The research findings are consistent with previous studies that in an organizational work environment, individuals may resort to knowledge hiding. Because they fear that the knowledge they share with good intentions may cause unexpected problems (Kuei et al., 2016). By hiding knowledge, individuals may believe that their colleagues will not be able to discover and exploit their weaknesses. In turn, this defensive behavior may inhibit the innovation of knowledge hiders. In a political work environment, knowledge hiders prefer to take actions that have a high probability of success and avoid innovation due to its risky nature. The findings also indicate that professional commitment moderates the positive relationship between organizational political decisions and knowledge hiding. In this way, individuals with high levels of professional commitment are more willing to expend energy to achieve their career goals (Goulett & Singh, 2002). As a result, people with professional commitment are less likely to engage in knowledge-hiding decisions, even while working in a political workplace.
Conclusion
Limited studies have examined the mediating mechanisms of the relationship between organizational political decisions and individual innovation (Ari et al., 2009(. To fill this important gap in the literature, it is proposed that knowledge hiding is responsible for mediating the negative impact of organizational political decisions on individual innovation. It also provides literature to show that organizational political decisions can invite individuals to participate in knowledge hiding and create a kind of reciprocal knowledge behavior, which in turn can lead to the innovation of the knowledge hiding individual. To obtain in-depth results of the relationship between organizational political decisions and knowledge hiding, the moderating role of professional commitment was considered, which is due to individual characteristics. It was also found that the relationship between organizational political decisions and professional commitment has a negative impact on knowledge hiding. These findings add to the literature on professional commitment and indicate that in a political work environment, individuals with high levels of professional commitment are less involved in knowledge hiding decisions than individuals with low levels of professional commitment. The findings also indicate that future research on individual innovation should examine individuals' situational characteristics as well as their mutual interactive effects.