Knowledge hiding in socioeconomic settings: Matching organizational and environmental antecedents

Managerial studies have long approached socioeconomic settings as “isolated” domains interested in defending themselves from the “external environment”. As a consequence, several managerial models have been developed to address employees and decision makers in protecting ‘internal resources’ as a means to ensure organizations’ suitable long-term survival. Building upon this wide and generally recognized assumption, the paper adopts the interpretative lens provided by a resource-based view and relationship marketing to investigate the influence of employees’ perceptions about internal organizational assets and environmental dynamics on employees’ orientation to knowledge hiding as a way to protect individual knowledge. The perceptions of 525 employees engaged in 21 Italian innovative small and medium enterprises have been analyzed using structural equation modeling. The paper underlines the need to support employees in overcoming an isolation-based view of socioeconomic settings in order to enhance knowledge value through a definition of human-based managerial models and research paths.