25 Apr 2025

“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 to sharing them in the future”

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

The management professor at the University of Toronto and expert in workplace deviance recalls something similar playing out during a work meeting. A colleague said something without getting a response, only to have it repeated later by someone else who got everyone’s attention – but there was no acknowledgement of who said it first.

The phenomenon is known as knowledge theft, and it involves intentionally claiming unjustifiable ownership of somebody else’s contributions, including ideas and work products such as presentations, systems or solutions to a business problem. 

“I noticed that this happened repeatedly,” says Zweig, a professor of organizational behaviour and human resources in the department of management at U of T Scarborough and the Rotman School of Management. “So, I started paying attention to how people did or did not credit the work of others. 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.”

To find out more, 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.

The study, published in the Journal of Knowledge Management, was co-authored by Alycia Damp of U of T's Centre for Industrial Relations and Human Resources and Kristyn Scott of the Ted Rogers School of Management at Toronto Metropolitan University.

The researchers found that knowledge theft was a common occurrence. “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,” says Zweig. “So, this is not a low base-rate behaviour.”

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, including 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 toxic environment, 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 to 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, he adds.

“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.