Investigating the effect of Perceived Ethical Leadership on Knowledge Hiding with the mediating role of Psychological safety and Meaningful work and the moderator role of Harmonious work passion

Knowledge is considered to be the most important asset of todays’ organizations but despite so much effort in order to share knowledge, still there seems to be a lot of challenges. Previous studies show that people do not represent any kind of interest in an acceptable extent of knowledge sharing; even if there would be an appropriate level of facilities, they hide their knowledge. Knowledge hiding will end in reduced productivity and profitability. There are a lot of different factors which affect knowledge hiding in organizations. This paper aims at examining the effect of perceived ethical leadership on staff knowledge hiding considering the mediating role of psychological safety and meaningful work and moderating role of harmonious work passion. This article is an applied research in terms of the goal of research and in terms of data gathering method this study utilizes descriptive-survey method. The statistical population of this research includes 4300 staff of an automotive company in Tehran and the sample covers 440 of these employees by non-probabilistic available sampling method. Data gathered through standard questionnaire, and structural equation modeling by using AMOS and SPSS software, which utilized to analyze data. Content validity of final questionnaire has been confirmed by examining the comments of management experts. The structural validity examined by confirmatory factor analysis and Cronbach's alpha coefficient proved to be bigger than 0.7 which confirmed the reliability. According to the results, perceived ethical leadership has a direct and negative effect on knowledge hiding. The positive roles of psychological safety and meaningful work as mediators and harmonious work passion as a moderator have been confirmed. The research concludes that the presence of ethical leaders is one of the factors which reduce knowledge hiding of staff in an organization.