Status Hoarding: How Higher Status Actors Steal Credit for Others’ Work

We examine factors that allow higher status people to steal credit from lower status people. Drawing on opportunity hoarding research and status characteristics and expectation states theory, we develop the concept of status hoarding: the use of one’s status position to accumulate more status through illegitimate means. Compared to similar concepts such as the Matthew Effect, which do not offer a mechanism by which benefits disproportionately accumulate, status hoarding explains how group structures give rise to perceptions of competence and reward deservingness among group members, which facilitate higher status actors’ ability to steal credit and thus increase their status. We use two survey experiments to test our arguments on the role of expectations and referential structures in both assigning credit to higher status actors and inhibiting lower status actors from reporting theft of their ideas. In study one, we find that participants were more likely to assign credit for a valued task contribution to a higher status actor, and these effects were mediated by expectations for reward and competence. In study two, we find that people perceive higher status actors as more likely to report credit stealing to their supervisors, but these effects were not mediated by expectations in the way that we predicted. We conclude with a general discussion of the broader implications of status hoarding and directions for future research.