THE ECONOMIST: The behaviour that annoys colleagues more than any other

Surveys of office behaviour are not scientific. In a global poll conducted last year by Kickresume, a firm that helps create CVs, 85 per cent of people said they had experienced an annoying co-worker. That means the remaining 15 per cent are either sole traders or liars.

But surveys can still reveal truths about what gets people riled up. The Kickresume survey put credit-stealing top of the list of irritating colleague behaviour, as did a survey of British workers in 2022 by Perspectus Global, a research firm. Another recent poll, this time of American workers and conducted by BambooHR, crowned taking credit for employees’ ideas as the worst managerial trait of all.

You get the picture. Grabbing kudos for someone else’s idea makes lots of people angry. In fact, it is seen as unacceptable from a very early age: research has shown that children as young as five disapprove of plagiarism.

Done intentionally and repeatedly, credit-grabbing is not just annoying but bad for the organisation: ideas are hoarded, trust erodes and motivation suffers.

A recent paper by Siyuan Chen of Beijing Jiaotong University and his co-authors found that credit-claiming by executives at a large Chinese manufacturing firm was associated with worse job performance by employees.

When something happens a lot and is extremely irritating, a coping mechanism is needed. So the next time you hear your brilliant idea coming out of the mouth of a colleague, breathe deeply and remember three things.

First, credit-stealing may be less malevolent than imagined. Psychologists have long documented a phenomenon called “cryptomnesia” in which people inadvertently plagiarise the ideas of others.

Experiments into cryptomnesia vary but the basic set-up is for participants in a group to be asked to generate ideas to solve a particular problem. They are then told to recall only their own ideas, and to come up with new ideas that do not replicate ones that have already been raised.

Despite these instructions, people tend to claim a decent chunk of old ideas as their own, and to copy previous suggestions when raising ostensibly new ideas. People may steal credit without even realising it.

Second, innovation very rarely takes the form of an entirely new idea; instead, it recombines existing ones. And people often reach the same conclusions independently. That is the message of “Like”, an entertaining new book by Martin Reeves and Bob Goodson on the origins of the “like” button.

The thumbs-up icon was made ubiquitous when Facebook adopted it in 2009, but well before then firms like Vimeo, Yelp, Digg.com and FriendFeed had been experimenting with ways for users to register an emotional reaction to content. So even if you think of an idea as your own stroke of genius, the reality is likely to be messier.

Third, credit-stealing can backfire. Decent bosses know that success stems from teams of people, not individuals (bad bosses will just appropriate the idea as their own anyway).

Work by Eric VanEpps of Vanderbilt University and his co-authors has found that the best way to project both competence and warmth is to mix a bit of bragging and a bit of praise for others. And though expressing pride in achievements, even if they are not your own, can be a good way to communicate an aura of success, it pays not to be too specific.

A paper by Rebecca Schaumberg of the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania looks at what happens when people show pride in a performance whose details are known to others.

Imagine, for example, two programmers who post identical high scores in a programming competition; one goes on a frenzy of fist-pumping and the other says she is not that proud of how she did.

Observers reckon that the buoyant programmer is at the ceiling of her potential, and judge the downbeat one to be more skilled. Overt credit-stealers may appear less, not more, competent.

Ideally, you would not need to reconcile yourself to a bit of credit-stealing. Recognition would simply be doled out accurately.

But even when credit has been allocated appropriately, there is another problem. Work by Heather Sarsons of the University of British Columbia and others has shown that male academic economists get tenure regardless of whether they solo-author or co-author papers; women are less likely to get tenure the more they co-author.

That suggests biases can still end up distorting recognition when it is not possible to know who contributed most on a team. That really is infuriating.