Knowledge Hiding / Information Hoarding

One-liner: Deliberately withholding information, documentation, or access a colleague needs to do their job, kept as leverage rather than shared as expertise.

Also known as / related terms: Knowledge hoarding, evasive hiding, playing dumb, gatekeeping, information silos.

What it is: Organizational behavior researchers Catherine Connelly, David Zweig, Jane Webster, and John Trougakos formally defined and measured this construct in their 2012 paper “Knowledge Hiding in Organizations” in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, distinguishing it from simply not knowing something and from organization-wide knowledge loss. They found it takes three related forms: evasive hiding (pretending to help while giving incomplete or delayed information), rationalized hiding (offering a justification for withholding, like confidentiality, that doesn’t hold up), and playing dumb (pretending not to know). Later reporting on Connelly’s continuing research, summarized by the Society for Human Resource Management, links the behavior to a workplace culture where knowledge is treated as power, where holding unique information makes a person feel indispensable, and to low trust between the person asking and the person answering.

What it looks like (workplace): A senior employee is the only one who knows how a critical process or client relationship actually works and never documents it, or a colleague answers a direct question with a vague non-answer, sends outdated instructions, or waits until after a deadline to share a file that would have prevented the failure.

Why they do it: Withholding a piece of institutional knowledge keeps a person indispensable and gives them leverage, whether that is job security, credit, or control over decisions that depend on information only they have.

How to protect yourself:

• Ask for documentation and process handoffs in writing and in advance of needing them, not in the moment of crisis.
• Build redundancy: cultivate more than one source for any critical piece of information or access.
• Notice patterns of “helpful but useless” answers. Repeated vague responses are data, not bad luck.
• Route requests through shared channels (tickets, shared docs) so delays and gaps are visible to more than just you.

Cross-links: Weaponized Incompetence, Credit Theft/Idea Appropriation, Chauffeur Knowledge.

Sources:

• Connelly, Zweig, Webster & Trougakos (2012), Journal of Organizational Behavior: “Knowledge hiding in organizations”, the foundational peer-reviewed paper defining and measuring the construct.
• How to Stop Employees from Hoarding Knowledge, SHRM, reporting on why employees hoard knowledge as leverage and job security, citing Connelly’s ongoing research.

Label note: Established, peer-reviewed academic construct in organizational behavior research with a validated measurement scale, not a site coining. The workplace descriptions above are illustrative applications of that research.