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This study examines how project leaders’ knowledge hiding influences project performance via project employee creativity, employing the conservation of resources theory. Further, we investigate how mastery motivational climate (MMC) moderates the project employee creativity and project performance relationship.

Employing purposive sampling design, two-wave data (N = 245) was collected with a gap of three weeks from employees working in R&D departments in private software development project-based organizations located in Lahore, Pakistan.

Results suggest that leaders’ knowledge hiding does impede project employee creativity and negatively influence project performance. In addition, MMC was found to accentuate the relationship between project employee creativity and project performance.

This study offers notable insights into the knowledge hiding literature from a top-down perspective within the project management domain relating to IT projects. This study’s findings pose implications for practitioners and project-based organizations who are interested in counteracting the adverse effects of knowledge hiding on project performance.

This study proposes a novel approach to job design by considering resource scarcity caused by a leader’s knowledge hiding as a job demand, along with the achievement goal perspective driven by a mastery or goal orientation. To understand these two perspectives, we rely on the conservation of resources (COR) theory to describe how a leader’s knowledge hiding affects project performance through project employee creativity, moderated by mastery motivational climate.