Background <p>Guided by the leader-member exchange theory and the social exchange theory, the current study predicts the buffering effect of leader-member exchange on employee counter-productive knowledge behavior, i.e., knowledge hiding through fueling their psychological empowerment. In addition, the study seeks to explore the interaction effect of leader-member guanxi in these links.</p> Method <p>The study examines these relationships on a sample of 393 service employees in the Chinese firms through employing partial least squares technique.</p> Results <p>The study’s findings provide support to our hypotheses that high-quality leader-member exchange relationships mitigate the occurrence context of knowledge hiding in the workplace by nurturing employees’ psychological empowerment, which serves as a causal mechanism inspiring the transformation of leader-member exchange into reduced knowledge hiding. Besides, the study also finds the significant intervening effect of leader-member guanxi that reinforces the positive influence of leader-member exchange on knowledge hiding through psychological empowerment.</p> Conclusion <p>The study is one of the few efforts that reveals a finer-grain understanding of the coping mechanisms that contribute to manage/reduce knowledge hiding in the workplace.</p> IRB approval no <p>IRB/DME/23/1457.</p>