Investigating the Relationship between Exploitative Leadership and Innovative Performance due to the Mediating Role of Knowledge Hiding

Today, organizations in various fields are facing huge challenges. The common focus of all of them is the development of knowledge, technology and innovation. To quickly adapt to these challenges and changing needs, organizations need to improve their employees’ innovations and creativities. Educational organizations as the most prominent, most influential, and most extensive organizations are responsible for people’s formal education and training in the society, as well as providing human resources to other organizations. They have an important and extraordinary impact on sustainability, social, economic, and cultural aspects of every country. As the most important members and architects of educational organizations and schools, teachers are considered the main element of competence of any educational system. The importance and unique role of creativity and innovative performance of teachers as a strategic source and designer and implementer of organizational systems and products have now found a far higher position in education than in the past. Since the majority of human resources working in the education system are teachers, addressing the current state of creativity, as well as the factors affecting their innovative performance in schools, is of double importance. Based on the findings of previous researches, leadership styles are one of the factors influencing teachers’ innovative performance. Exploitative leadership as a very self-interested leadership style has many negative effects. It leads to a decrease in job satisfaction and emotional commitment, an increase in the intention to leave the job, job burnout, deviant behaviors in the workplace, hiding knowledge, and reducing the employees’ productivity and innovative performance. Hiding knowledge as another factor affecting innovative performance has destructive effects on organizational effectiveness in the current era. As a negative behavior that includes a conscious refusal to provide knowledge and is requested by another person it can disrupt the relationships between employees, lead to mistrust, and be very harmful to individual and organizational performance. Considering that exploitative leaders play an important role in teachers’ attitudes and behaviors and the exploitative leadership style as one of the new leadership styles has not been investigated and studied in the country so far, we decided to fill this research gap by examining the consequences and results of this leadership style in schools and find out the answer to this question: How do exploitative leaders in schools reduce teachers’ innovative performance by hiding knowledge?

The current research was based on an applied goal and with a descriptive-correlation method. The research population included all the teachers of two districts of Shiraz (1945 people). The sample size (319 teachers) was determined based on the simple random sampling method and Cochran’s formula. The questionnaires of Schmid and colleagues (2019) for exploitative leadership with 15 items with 5 subscales of showing selfish behaviors (Questions 1 to 3), applying pressure (Questions 4 to 6), undermining employees’ developments (Questions 7 to 9), gaining credibility (Questions 10 to 12), and hypocrisy (Questions 13 to 15), questionnaires Connelly and Zweig (2015) for concealment of knowledge with 12 items and 3 subscales of evasive concealment (Questions 1 to 4), logical concealment (Questions 5 to 8), and dumbing down (Questions 9 to 12), and questionnaires of Huang and Li (2018) for innovative performance with 7 items and 2 subscales of executive innovation (Questions 1 to 4) and technical innovation (Questions 5 to 7) were used in the 5-point Likert scale to collect the data.

The aim of this research was to investigate the relationship between exploitative leadership and innovative performance through the mediating role of knowledge hiding. The results of the research showed that the leadership variable had a direct, negative, and significant relationship with the teachers’ innovative performance at the level of 0.05; hiding knowledge had a direct, negative, and significant relationship with their innovative performance at the level of 0.05; and exploitative leadership had an indirect, negative, and significant relationship with their innovative performance at the level of 0.05. To improve teachers’ creativities, it is suggested that education officials and school administrators exchange information and knowledge by studying and recognizing the undesirable characteristics of exploitative leadership and the destructive consequences that this leadership style can have on the performance of teachers and schools and thus try to induce creative performance in teachers.