How, and why do employees hide knowledge?

See the following for more detailes:
"The paper identifies three ways employees hide what they know from co-workers: being evasive, rationalized hiding - such as saying a report is confidential -- and playing dumb.
Why do they do it?"
http://www.rotman.utoronto.ca/ne...Edit
6 Answers

Dorian Taylor, Make things. Make sense.
7 votes by Arie Goldshlager, Marc Bodnick, Ben Newman, (more)
  
There is a paper from 1985 by Jonathan Grudin called "Why CSCW Applications Fail": http://social.cs.uiuc.edu/class/... . It advances the notion that Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (aka groupware) environments have a tendency to merely transfer workloads from some people to others. If a given system only works if everybody uses it, it's conceivable that those on the side of increased workload simply don't bother to cooperate, as there is nothing in it for them. It's an economic alternative, or at least complement, to the narrative that the motivation is political.
1 Comment • Options • May 30, 2011

Gabi Gol
2 votes by Marc Bodnick and Mircea Goia
  
A reason in certain situations could be that if they share their knowledge, they might intimidate their insecure and incompetent boss. If their best intentions at sharing and going beyond the call of duty are thwarted, survival mode kicks in and people will only share the minimum of what is required to do their job and keep the work environment tolerable.
Comment • Options • May 30, 2011

Daniel Lemire, Computer scientist and Open Scholar.
2 votes by Marc Bodnick and Alex K Chen
  
There are actually three categories:

You can be passive. You neither try to hide or share your knowledge.
You actively try to share you knowledge, maybe by contributing to a corporate wiki.
You activity try to hide your knowledge by "playing dumb" and failing to explain yourself when ask to.

According to my experience, most people fit in the first category. They simply cannot be bothered to actively share their knowledge.
Comment • Options • May 30, 2011

Jan Mixon, Traveling Contractor, Philosopher, Wa...
1 vote by Bill McDonald
  
Frankly, the more that show you understand and can do, the more you'll end up doing. For the same pay as people who are either paid the same as you or a much higher amount.

Many managers and supervisors like "jacks and jills of all trades" as they are their "go-to people" ,meaning that they can be abused more than less competent or incompetent employees. If certain workers show that they can easily work far in excess of their training or their job requirements, the more they'll be forced to do by bosses who need the work to be done.

Demonstrating your abilities rarely results in a promotion, as promoting
them would deprive that supervisor/manager of a sorely needed competent
employee. Smart workers quickly learn that "playing dumb" and being evasive are the only ways that they don't become inundated with more work than their co-workers and often more work than they can do.
Comment • Options • Jul 10, 2011

Olivier Earl Goodman, Department of the National Defense - ...
2 votes by Gabi Gol and Bill McDonald
  
Knowledge is equal to power. A lot of people keep knowledge to themself because they represent the key employee in a organisation or the employee with the key competencies (leadership). In other words, people will need them. How do they keep knowledge? They just don't transfer or share their knowledge with others.
Comment • Options • Jul 8, 2011

Sami Köykkä
  
They think having private knowledge is to their advantage.
Comment • Options • May 21, 2011
How, and why do employees hide knowledge? - Quora