Confronting Idea Stealers in the Workplace: The Unfortunate Moral Credentialing Granted to Power-Holders

How and when do employees confront one another for stealing their ideas? Business communication literature on confronting unethical behavior is synthesized with moral licensing theory to better understand responses to unethical actors about unjustified credit taking in the workplace. In this message production experiment, working adults (N = 344) were randomly assigned to respond to a supervisor, peer coworker, or subordinate who stole or ignored the participant’s intellectual contributions. Content and statistical analyses revealed subordinates were comparatively less direct when confronting bosses, suggesting third-party moral licensing and moral credentialing were measurable in communication patterns. Importantly, this dynamic was not attributable to perceptions of task interdependence. Instead, subordinates perceived the stealing or ignoring of their ideas to be less unethical than did bosses. Additionally, individuals whose ideas have been stolen in the workplace were less confrontational compared to those who have not. Thus, data suggest incremental acquiescence to this form of workplace wrongdoing, particularly when the transgressor holds high hierarchical status. Taken together, these data may explain how recognition for ideas tends to spread vertically to bosses (labeled here, vertical credit creep), which may function to reinforce established power arrangements and to perpetuate unjustified credit taking in the workplace.