Why Generous Workplace Policies Can Make Employees Hide Knowledge Instead of Sharing It

Every organization wants employees who share what they know. Companies pour money into training programs, mentoring schemes, career development plans, and generous feedback systems, all in the hope that well-supported workers will reciprocate by contributing their expertise to the collective. But a new study published in BMC Psychology suggests that this assumption deserves scrutiny. According to research by Yanwei Sun of Zhuhai City Polytechnic and Ting Nie of Macao University of Science and Technology, the very practices designed to develop employees can push them in two opposite directions at once: toward openly sourcing knowledge from colleagues, or toward quietly hoarding what they know. Which direction they go depends heavily on one factor that many managers overlook: how much performance pressure they feel.

The study focuses on what researchers call developmental human resource management practices, a bundle of organizational policies that prioritize the personal value and long-term potential of employees. Unlike traditional human resource systems built around control, monitoring, and short-term output, developmental approaches invest in growth from multiple angles. They include extensive training, skill development opportunities, career planning, and feedback mechanisms intended to help people build capabilities over time. The underlying promise is synergistic: the organization supports the employee’s development, and in return the employee contributes more fully to the organization. Sun and Nie set out to test whether that promise actually holds when it comes to knowledge behavior, one of the most valuable currencies in modern workplaces.

To build their theoretical framework, the researchers turned to Conservation of Resources Theory, a widely used model in organizational psychology. The theory proposes that people are fundamentally motivated to acquire, protect, and build resources they value, whether those resources are material, social, or psychological. When individuals gain resources, they enter an upward spiral of investment and growth; when they fear losing resources, they shift into a defensive mode, protecting what they have rather than sharing it. This dual dynamic makes the theory a natural lens for studying knowledge behavior, because sharing expertise with colleagues is a form of resource investment, while hoarding it is a form of resource defense.

The authors proposed that developmental human resource management practices influence knowledge behavior through a psychological mechanism called organization-based self-esteem. This construct captures how much a person feels valued, competent, and significant specifically within their organization. It is not general self-confidence; it is the sense of personal worth that arises from one’s standing at work. When an organization invests heavily in an employee’s development, the theory suggests, that employee comes to see themselves as a valued member whose abilities matter. That elevated sense of worth then shapes how they behave with their knowledge. Feeling valued can encourage people to give back, seeking out new information from others and contributing their own insights in turn. But a strong sense of personal value can also have a darker edge: employees who feel exceptionally capable may believe their knowledge is precisely what makes them indispensable, giving them a reason to guard it rather than share it.

To test these ideas, the researchers conducted a two-wave survey of employees in Chinese companies, measuring the variables at two separate points in time. This longitudinal design is methodologically important because it reduces the risk that the results simply reflect people describing everything in a single, self-consistent moment. The study received ethics approval from the Research Ethics Committee of the School of Business at Macau University of Science and Technology and was conducted in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki, with written informed consent obtained from all participants. The research was supported by funding from the Guangdong Provincial Education Science Planning Leading Group Office and the Guangdong Province Department of Education.

The results confirmed what the authors describe as a double-edged sword effect. Developmental human resource management practices were indirectly associated with both knowledge sourcing and knowledge hoarding, and organization-based self-esteem was the channel through which both effects flowed. In other words, the same set of supportive practices, filtered through the same psychological mechanism, could produce either generous knowledge exchange or protective knowledge hiding. The practices themselves do not choose the outcome; they amplify the employee’s sense of worth, and that amplified self-perception can be spent in either direction.

The decisive factor turned out to be performance pressure. When employees faced high levels of pressure to perform, the balance tipped decisively toward hoarding. Under demanding conditions, workers responding to developmental practices were more likely to hold onto their knowledge than to seek or share it. The logic follows directly from Conservation of Resources Theory: pressure signals that resources are at risk, and threatened individuals defend what they have. An employee who has been told they are talented and valuable, and who simultaneously feels that their performance is under intense scrutiny, has every incentive to treat their expertise as a personal safety net. Sharing knowledge with a colleague who might outperform them, or asking for help in ways that expose gaps, feels dangerous when the stakes are high. Under low pressure, by contrast, the resource-gaining side of the theory dominates, and the same developmental practices are more likely to encourage open knowledge sourcing.

The findings carry a pointed message for managers who assume that investment in people automatically produces collaboration. Developmental human resource management is not a self-executing strategy. Its effects on knowledge behavior are conditional, and the condition is the emotional and evaluative climate in which employees operate. A company can offer excellent training, thoughtful career planning, and supportive feedback, yet still end up with employees who hoard their expertise, simply because those employees feel that every day is a test they cannot afford to fail. The study suggests that organizations should fully consider how developmental practices land under different scenarios, calibrating performance expectations so that the sense of being valued translates into contribution rather than self-protection.

There is also a broader lesson here about the psychology of generosity at work. Knowledge sharing is often treated as a policy problem, solved with collaboration platforms, incentive schemes, and open-office design. This research reframes it as a question of psychological resources. Employees share knowledge when they feel resource-rich and secure, and they hoard it when they feel that their standing is threatened, regardless of what the official culture says. Organization-based self-esteem sits at the center of that calculation, which means the way organizations make people feel about their worth is not a soft concern but a direct lever on one of the hardest problems in knowledge management.

For researchers, the study adds a nuanced data point to a growing literature on the unintended consequences of well-intentioned human resource practices. For practitioners, it offers a practical warning: the return on developmental investment depends on the pressure cooker surrounding it. Organizations that pair employee development with relentless performance demands may be quietly training their workforce to protect rather than share, undermining the very collaboration that development programs are meant to build. The double-edged sword, in other words, is held by the organization itself, and which edge cuts depends on the environment leaders create around their people.

Subject of Research: The effects of developmental human resource management practices on employee knowledge sourcing and knowledge hoarding through organization-based self-esteem and performance pressure

Article Title: Sourcing or hoarding? The impact of developmental human resource management practices on employee knowledge behaviors

Article References: Sourcing or hoarding? The impact of developmental human resource management practices on employee knowledge behaviors. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.1186/s40359-026-05788-5

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1186/s40359-026-05788-5

Keywords: developmental human resource management, knowledge hoarding, knowledge sourcing, organization-based self-esteem, performance pressure, Conservation of Resources Theory, organizational psychology, knowledge management, employee behavior, workplace psychology, human resource development, BMC Psychology