Ethical leadership, workplace incivility and knowledge hiding behavior: Direct and indirect relations

It is understood that the issue of knowledge hiding behavior has an important place in business life. However, it is seen that this issue has not yet been examined, along with some other variables that it may be related to. The aim of this study is to investigate the direct and indirect relationships between ethical leadership, workplace incivility, and knowledge hiding behavior. In order to achieve this objective, 230 bank employees working in the private and public sectors in the Central Black Sea Region were reached. In October-November 2023, data were collected by using the quantitative research method and survey technique. The questionnaire includes ethical leadership, workplace incivility, and knowledge hiding behavior scales. In addition, there are questions to determine the demographic characteristics of the participants. The obtained data were analyzed with IBM SPSS, IBM SPSS Amos, Process Macro software. At this stage, validity and reliability analyses were conducted, and hypothesis tests were applied. According to the results, it was determined that ethical leadership contributed in a negative direction in explaining workplace incivility, and workplace incivility contributed in a positive direction in explaining knowledge hiding behavior. However, it was found that ethical leadership was statistically insignificant in explaining knowledge hiding behavior. Finally, it was found that workplace incivility has an indirect effect on ethical leadership's effect on knowledge hiding behavior. Accordingly, ethical leadership contributes in a negative direction to the explanation of knowledge hiding behavior through workplace incivility. Within the scope of the study, suggestions for individuals in business life and for future research are presented.