Exploring the impact of leader knowledge sharing on leader-rated employee performance: a curvilinear effect moderated by employee humility

In the dynamic workplace landscape, leaders serve as crucial knowledge providers, significantly contributing to the growth and development of their employees. While the outcomes of knowledge sharing are well-documented, most studies have predominantly focused on the perspective of knowledge recipients, leaving a gap in understanding knowledge sharing from the provider's standpoint. Adopting a provider-centric approach, our paper examines the influence of leader knowledge sharing on leader-rated employee performance with a three-wave survey on 541 employees and their leaders across 22 teams. Grounded in self-perception theory and accounting for the 'too-much-of-a-good-thing' effect, we propose and empirically test an inverted U-shaped relationship between leader knowledge sharing and leader-rated employee performance (linear: β = 0.394, R2 = 0.269; quadratic: β = -0.156, R2 = 0.275). We also introduce a characteristic of recipients, i.e., employee humility, as an important moderator in this relationship (linear: β = 0.290; quadratic: β = 0.340; R2 = 0.287), such that the inverted U-shaped pattern is more pronounced when employee humility is low but turns out to be a positive linear relationship with increasing slope for highly humble employees. Theoretical contributions and practical implications are discussed with valuable insights for both academia and practitioners.