Employees are encouraged to share their knowledge to stimulate creativity and innovation. However, individuals may hide their knowledge to pursue personal interests. Drawing on the coopetition perspective, this study investigates how individual-level knowledge sharing and hiding behaviors jointly influence employees’ creative behaviors, as well as the knowledge sharing-hiding interaction mechanisms. We adopt a mixed-method design combining qualitative and quantitative analyses. Two types of knowledge sharing are identified: Proactive and reactive, both of which promote employees’ creative behaviors. A follow-up empirical test shows that knowledge-hiding behaviors positively moderate the relationship between reactive knowledge sharing and employees’ creative behaviors. However, knowledge-hiding behaviors demonstrate an inverted U-shaped moderating effect on the relationship between proactive knowledge sharing and employees’ creative behaviors. This study makes a pioneering attempt to study the interplay between knowledge sharing and knowledge hiding and challenges the conventional notion regarding the role of knowledge hiding in employees’ creative behaviors.

鼓励员工分享知识以激发创造力和创新。然而，个人可能会隐藏自己的知识来追求个人利益。本研究借鉴合作竞争的视角，探讨个体层面的知识共享与隐藏行为如何共同影响员工的创造性行为，以及知识共享与隐藏的交互机制。我们采用定性和定量分析相结合的混合方法设计。确定了两种类型的知识共享：主动式和被动式，两者都促进员工的创造性行为。后续的实证检验表明，知识隐藏行为正向调节反应性知识共享与员工创造性行为之间的关系。然而，知识隐藏行为对主动知识共享与员工创造性行为之间的关系表现出倒U型调节效应。本研究在研究知识共享和知识隐藏之间的相互作用方面做出了开创性的尝试，并挑战了关于知识隐藏在员工创造性行为中的作用的传统观念。