If you’ve ever shared an idea only to hear it repeated by someone else or had someone take credit for your work, David Zweig knows exactly what you’re talking about.

The University of Toronto professor and expert in workplace deviance watched something similar play out during a work meeting. One colleague said something without getting a response, only to have it repeated later by someone else — to a better response, but no acknowledgement of who’d said it first.

“I noticed that this happened repeatedly. So I started paying attention to how people did or did not credit the work of others,” says Zweig, a professor of organizational behaviour and human resources at the University of Toronto Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management. “Although this notion of knowledge theft is widely recognized in the popular press, there was very little research on this in our field. That got me interested in the impact of being a victim of knowledge theft.”

Knowledge theft is about intentionally claiming unjustifiable ownership of somebody else’s contributions, including ideas and work products such as presentations, systems or solutions to a business problem.

It turns out that people stealing other people’s ideas and work hurts a lot more than the victims. Driven to find out more, Prof. Zweig and two colleagues ran a series of studies with more than 1,500 workers in different industries in the United States, the United Kingdom and Canada to establish knowledge theft as a distinct form of bad workplace behaviour, figure out how to measure it, and identify how it gets in the way of transmitting knowledge across a firm.

They found that knowledge theft was “a really common occurrence in the studies we did,” says Prof. Zweig. “In one study, 91 per cent of the participants reported either being a victim of knowledge theft, being a perpetrator (a knowledge thief), or witnessing this happen to other people. So this is not a low base rate behavior.”

Victims of knowledge theft reported being more protective and territorial about their work afterwards, including actively hiding their knowledge or staying silent when colleagues asked for help. They were also likelier to retaliate against colleagues, such as by insulting co-workers. And those reactions weren’t confined to where the theft happened – victims took their bad memories and protective behaviours with them when they changed jobs.

Knowledge theft, “creates a really toxic environment,” Prof. Zweig says. “If we get burned, or we’re not getting credit from our leaders or colleagues when our ideas are stolen, we’re not going to be so open with sharing them in the future.”

Given that knowledge is a key workplace resource and companies typically promote the sharing of knowledge across the organization, behaviour that sabotages that sharing has to be confronted, Prof. Zweig says.

“If you see something, say something,” he says. “You need to call out knowledge theft. Leaders need to do that. They need to be very cognizant that this happens. It can’t be normalized.”

Organizations can also focus on rewarding teams as a group instead of individual members to reduce motivations for claiming sole credit, the researchers recommend.

Prof. Zweig will continue his academic work on knowledge theft and its impact on people and organizations. The topic will be addressed in his forthcoming book to be published by Rotman-UTP Publishing.

The study appears in the Journal of Knowledge Management