Stealing ideas at the workplace

Master's Thesis from the year 2011 in the subject Psychology - Work, Business, Organisation, grade: 1,0, London School of Economics (The London School of Economics & Political Science), course: Organisationspsychologie, language: English, abstract: This study aims to show that situational cues like semantic primes are able to influence aparticipant's decision-making in the context of taking credit for someone else's idea at theworkplace. In a laboratory experiment either a competitive, cooperative or neutralenvironment was simulated by using subliminal priming techniques. Participants were thenexposed to a hypothetical scenario in which they were urged due to their heavy workload to take credit for a colleague's idea. In particular, the study examined four constructs: theparticipants' willingness to take credit for this idea without and with escalating consequencesfor not choosing to do it, the perceived ethical costs related to that action and the perceptionof others mindsets. It was expected that participants in the competitive condition would bemore willing to take credit for the colleague's idea and perceive less ethical costs than in theneutral condition and vice versa for the participants in the cooperative condition. Additionally,the study expected the participants to perceive the mindset of a random other in the samesituation to be similar to their own mindset. Furthermore, qualitative data was collected toexplore the decision-making process in such a situation. The results showed that situationalcues did not significantly influence the individual decision-making in this particular context. However, several unexpected findings about the relationships between the tested constructsdeliver valuable implications for future research on the topic of taking credit for other people'sideas. In addition, the findings from the qualitative analysis suggest that future studies haveto differentiate between ethical and utilitarian considerations to gain further insights into theindividual decision-making process.