Unboxing Cynicism-Career Satisfaction Relationship: Role of Organizational Dis/identification

This paper used conservation of resources theory to investigate when and how organizational cynicism affects employees’ career satisfaction. We examine the indirect relationship between organizational cynicism and employees’ career satisfaction via knowledge hiding and postulate the moderated mediation of organizational dis/identification. Overall, using three-wave data obtained from several organizations in Indonesia, our hypotheses gain supports; in particular, our results indicate that: (1) organizational cynicism enhanced the employees' knowledge hiding, in turn, diminished employees career satisfaction; (2) when organizational disidentification is high, the relationship between organizational cynicism on employees’ knowledge hiding is stronger. Conversely, when organizational identification is high, the relationship between organizational cynicism and employees’ knowledge hiding is weaker; and (3) the conditional indirect effects of organizational dis/identification predicting the indirect effect were stronger (lower) when organizational dis/identification is high (low). Implications for theory and practice are also discussed.