"It's Mine." The Role of Psychological Ownership and Territoriality in Knowledge Hiding

Recently, researchers started asking why and how people hide knowledge. One explanation is that people develop feelings of psychological ownership for their knowledge and tend to protect it by engaging in territoriality. Prior research holds that psychological ownership is an important antecedent of knowledge hiding. However, little is known about how people develop these feelings of ownership for knowledge. This research-in-progress derives a theoretical model and proposes that knowledge characteristics are triggers for the development of ownership feelings. The characteristics in the focus of this paper are knowledge complexity and knowledge uniqueness. Moreover, this paper suggests that ownership manifests in two particular territorial intentions (defending and marking), which, in turn, impact hiding behavior. This study is one of the first that focuses on knowledge characteristics to address the development of ownership feelings as the main explanation for knowledge hiding.