Customers’ devaluation in hospitality organizations: A social learning perspective of customer-targeted knowledge hiding behavior

We aim to investigate whether, how, and when frontline service employees (FSEs), as observers of leaders’ knowledge hiding behavior toward customers (LKH-C), engage in employee knowledge hiding behavior toward customers (EKH-C). We introduce employees’ devaluation of customers (EDC) as an indicator of the social learning of LKH-C. To understand the trickle effects of knowledge hiding toward customers from supervisors to FSEs, we introduce leader–member exchange (LMX) as a first-stage moderator that can intensify the influence of negative role modeling and moral identity (MI) as a second-stage moderator that can “break the cycle” of top-down knowledge hiding. We collected time-lagged data (i.e., responses from FSEs at three different time points) from three- to five-star-ranked hotels in the eastern province of Saudi Arabia (N = 379). We found that LKH-C stimulates EKH-C through EDC. We also noted that the indirect effect of LKH-C on EKH-C via EDC could be intensified at high LMX and that FSEs with high-MI could break the cycle of top-down knowledge hiding behavior. From the perspective of social learning theory (i.e., cognitive processes), we aim to understand whether, how, and when FSEs observing LKH-C engages in EKH-C at high vs. low values of LMX and MI. Our findings have important implications for managers, practitioners, and organizations with regard to “breaking the cycle” of knowledge hiding in the hospitality industry and maximizing overall customer experience.