The mediating role of employee jealousy and moderating role of trait competitiveness in the effect of leader member exchange on employees' knowledge sharing behavior

Knowledge management is one of the business processes that has taken place in organizations since the 1990s and has become increasingly important. Having knowledge as well as managing it and ensuring that it is shared by employees is highly effective on the basic components of competitive advantage such as performance, productivity, innovation and creativity. Managers look for ways to encourage employees to share their knowledge with others in the organization. In order to share knowledge in organizations, employees should be willing to do so. This study was conducted to better understand the factors that may lead employees to share or avoid sharing knowledge. The research presents two studies that examine the relationship between leader-member exchange and employees' knowledge sharing behavior and the mediating role of employee jealousy and the moderating role of trait competitiveness on this relationship. SPSS 21 package program and SmartPls 4 statistics program were used for the analysis of the research. Firstly, validity and reliability analyses of the constructs were conducted; in this direction, internal consistency reliability, convergent validity and divergent validity were examined. Partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was used to test the test hypotheses. According to the research findings, high levels of leader-member interaction in organizations increase employees' knowledge sharing. On the relationship between leader-member exchange and knowledge sharing behavior, employee jealousy has a mediating effect and trait competitiveness has a moderating effect on the relationship between employee jealousy and knowledge sharing behavior. The research findings revealed similar results for both studies.