Knowledge hiding – intentionally concealing knowledge from a colleague who requested it – is often damaging for individuals and organizations. Amongst the factors explaining knowledge hiding, one has been overlooked, despite being an important lens for understanding employee behaviours: gender. In this article, we investigate its relevance by examining whether and how gender shapes two complementary aspects of knowledge hiding behaviour: frequency of hiding, and the approaches that knowledge hiders employ to do so. Building on extant literature about gender roles at the workplace, we suggest that the social roles into which women and men are socialized, and the sanctions they face if they behave incongruently with these roles affect both aspects of knowledge hiding. We explore these ideas in a multi-wave study of full-time employees based in the United Kingdom (n = 449). Our findings suggest that men hide their knowledge from colleagues more frequently. In addition, both women and men hide knowledge in a way that is congruent with the expectations of others regarding their social role: that is, women use evasive hiding and playing dumb more than men, while men use rationalized hiding more than women. A male-dominated context reduces these differences between genders.

中文翻译：

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谁的嘴唇被封住了？工作中隐藏知识的性别差异

知识隐藏——故意向提出请求的同事隐瞒知识——通常会对个人和组织造成损害。在解释知识隐藏的因素中，有一个因素被忽视了，尽管它是理解员工行为的重要视角：性别。在本文中，我们通过研究性别是否以及如何塑造知识隐藏行为的两个互补方面来调查其相关性：隐藏频率以及知识隐藏者采用的方法。根据有关工作场所性别角色的现有文献，我们认为，女性和男性所扮演的社会角色，以及如果他们的行为与这些角色不一致时所面临的制裁，都会影响知识隐藏的两个方面。我们通过对英国全职员工（n  = 449）的多波研究来探索这些想法。我们的研究结果表明，男性更频繁地向同事隐瞒自己的知识。此外，女性和男性隐藏知识的方式都符合他人对其社会角色的期望：也就是说，女性比男性更多地使用回避性隐藏和装傻，而男性则比女性更多地使用合理化隐藏。男性主导的环境减少了性别之间的差异。