Background <p>Employee knowledge hiding severely hinders organizational innovation, yet how a positive organizational care climate inhibits this behavior remains insufficiently understood. Most existing single-theory explanations fail to clearly articulate the complete psychological pathway linking environmental resources to individual behaviors. This study integrates Conservation of Resources Theory and Affective Events Theory to systematically construct and test a serial mediation model, illuminating how organizational care reduces knowledge hiding via organization-based self-esteem and employee loyalty.</p> Methods <p>A two-wave questionnaire survey was conducted among employees from enterprises in Shanghai, Beijing, Hubei, Henan, and Guangdong, China, with a 6-month interval between data collections. The survey yielded 335 valid responses. Structural equation modeling was used to analyze the data and test the hypothesized model.</p> Results <p>The results show that organizational care is significantly and negatively related to knowledge hiding behavior. While organization-based self-esteem does not have a significant direct mediating effect, employee loyalty acts as a significant mediator. Furthermore, organization-based self-esteem and employee loyalty play a chain-mediated role in the relationship between organizational care and knowledge hiding. Specifically, organizational care enhances organization-based self-esteem, which in turn increases employee loyalty and ultimately reduces knowledge hiding behavior.</p> Conclusions <p>This study demonstrates that organizational care effectively reduces knowledge hiding behavior by enhancing employees’ organization-based self-esteem and strengthening their loyalty to the organization. These findings enrich the theoretical frameworks of resource conservation and affective event theories and provide practical guidance for organizations to manage negative knowledge behaviors by fostering a supportive organizational environment.</p>