Soothing the Self-Threat of Idea Theft

The creative process has the potential to increase wellbeing and foster human flourishing (Dolan and Metcalfe, 2012; Forgeard and Eichner, 2014; O’Brien and Murray, 2015; Conner et al., 2018; Kaufman, 2018), yet has received little attention in the humanistic management literature. In this paper, we present three experiments showing that idea originators experience greater relationship conflict with counterparts who have committed perceived “idea theft”, i.e., proposed identical or related ideas. We test a model that identifies a mechanism—self-threat—that mediates the relationship between idea theft and relationship conflict and identifies an intervention to ameliorate that self-threat via self-affirmation. Study 1 demonstrates the idea originator’s attribution of malign attributions to, and negative moral emotions toward, the counterpart. Study 2 demonstrates that idea originators ostracize both those who propose identical ideas and those who propose merely related ideas. In Study 3, evidence for self-threat as the mechanism underlying the negative relational consequences is provided via both a direct test of mediation as well as via moderation by self-affirmation. Our research contributes to the nascent idea theft literature and suggests a way to reduce its negative consequences.