Canadian HR Reporter

SEPTEMBER 8, 2014 CANADIAN HR REPORTER & STRATEGIC CAPABILITY NETWORK Hidden in plain sight Examining 'knowledge hiding' within organizations BY LIZ BERNIER Academics and researchers are always trying to uncover hidden knowledge about organizations. Maybe it's knowledge about em- ployee behaviour or the ROI of hiring diverse candidates, or how silos and subcultures emerge. But a new area of research is fo- cusing directly on the knowledge or information employees with- hold from each other — a process referred to as "knowledge hiding." "We've all been in a situation where we're working on some- thing, we need help with some- thing, we know there's somebody who knows that thing. So you ask them, and you don't get an answer that helps you," said Catherine Connelly, Canada research chair and associate professor of organi- zation behaviour at the DeGroote School of Business at McMaster University in Hamilton. "And, by the same token, some- times you're in a situation on the other side where there are some- times reasons why we're not as helpful as we (could) be." There are different ways in which employees can hide knowl- edge — it's not just simply a "yes or no" thing — there are a lot of nuances and shades of grey, said Connelly at a Strategic Capability Network event in Toronto. "One of the main things to keep in mind is that it's an intentional response. It isn't just that you ac- tually don't know and you would like to help but you just can't. is is you intentionally are keeping something to yourself," she said. But knowledge hiding is not necessarily malicious — a person might have good reasons for with- holding information, she said. ree strategies ere are essentially three diff erent ways employees tend to engage in knowledge hiding, said Connelly. "One strategy could be rational- ized hiding. So by this I just mean that there is a rationale behind it. It's not like you're trying to ratio- nalize anything, it's that you have some reasons and you're explain- ing these reasons," she said. "Maybe somebody asks you for help and you say, 'I'd love to help you, it's just that this is confi den- tial information right now. I can't share who we're going to hire until this date — I'll tell you later.'" Rationalized hiding is fairly straightforward, but the other two strategies are less so. " e next one is what we call evasive hiding and this is where the level of duplicity starts to go up just a little bit. In this case, the hider pretends that the informa- tion will be forthcoming — and there's lots of ways to do that. You could say, 'Oh, right, I'll get back to you.' Or you send an email and say, "Oh, it's really easy, all you have to do is this.' But, really, you know there's a lot more to it than that — you just don't want to get into it," she said. "So there's some information or a promise of information but you're not actually sharing the important stuff ." e third strategy involves the most duplicity of the three, and Connelly refers to it as "playing dumb." "So somebody asks you 'How do you do that?' and you say, 'What are you talking about? I don't know what that is. Ask somebody else; they know a lot more than I do,'" she said. "In this case, you're pretending to be ig- norant. It's sort of the opposite of being a know-it-all." Negative impacts So why is knowledge hiding a problem? It can have a number of negative impacts on the organiza- tion, said Connelly. "When somebody is asking for help with something, they're putting themselves out there — they're being a little bit vulnerable. And if that help is not forthcom- ing when they think it should be, it's going to hurt your relationship a little bit." Interestingly, the type of hiding really matters in terms of what im- pact it will have on the relation- ship, she said. "A lot of times, people think that the rationalized hiding is going to be too awkward… you kind of have to say to the person 'You're not senior enough for this information' or 'You're not in the in-group.' "And so people feel really awk- ward about it and I think that's why they default to the 'I don't know' or the 'I'll get back to you, sorry,'" she said. "But it's actually the opposite. In our research, we found that people react the very worst to the most (duplicitous) ways of hiding the knowledge, and people are actually understanding when it Credit: Noppadolsign/Shutterstock TRUST > pg. 12 "People feel really awkward about it and I think that's why they default to 'I don't know' or 'I'll get back to you, sorry.'"

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