Not everything that glitters is gold: The dark side of leadership and rewards

Grounding on the relevance of knowledge assets to organizations’ long-term competitiveness, this work seeks to explore the ‘dark side’ effects of knowledge sharing behaviours, by unveiling the dysfunctional consequences that some traditionally beneficial variables can have on them. Given that knowledge sharing behaviours seldom occur voluntarily, as they may entail a loss of individual power, we conceive them as following a request and therefore propose the term ‘knowledge sharing on demand’. In order to develop our argument, we focus on the extent to which knowledge sharing is influenced by both individual and organizational factors. Among the former, we examine knowledge self-efficacy and introjected regulation, while the latter are represented in our model by supportive leadership style and extrinsic rewards. Starting from this, we analyse 760 employees of 23 international manufacturing companies and found that supportive leadership as well as extrinsic rewards can endanger the relationship between individual-level variables and employees’ engagement in knowledge sharing on demand. In so doing, we provide empirical evidence on some unexpected effects that existing research on knowledge-based processes has neglected. Accordingly, our work offers several contributions to extant literature and suggests interesting implications for managers as well as potential directions for future research.