Congratulations to CIRHR PhD Candidate Alycia Damp, whose paper, "Knowledge Theft in Organizations," co-authored with David Zweig (Department of Management, UTSC), was judged to be one of the best papers in the program of the Academy of Management annual conference.
An abridged version of the paper was published in the Proceedings of the 2021 Academy of Management Meeting.
Alycia says she studies knoweldge theft for two reasons. One is the question of why "knowledge theft is damaging to the careers of some victims and not of others. In other words, what are the mechanisms that link knowledge theft victimization to damaged career success?"
The second reason is the question of how knowledge theft affects organizations. "What we find in our paper is that knowledge theft is a catalyst for other counterproductive behaviours that impede knowledge sharing and knowledge transfer between employees in organizations."
Alycia describes this paper as a "foundational piece." The paper "introduces the concept of knowledge theft to the literature and provides scholars with a psychometrically validated measure with the hope of stimulating an empirical body of research on the topic."
Alycia and her doctoral supervisor, David Zweig, are already at work on that growing body of knowledge.
"While Dave, my doctoral supervisor and co-author on this paper, is now focusing his efforts on studying perpetrators of knowledge theft, my doctoral research builds on this paper by taking a closer look at victims."
"The next project in my pipeline focuses on contextual elements of knowledge theft experiences. For example, what does it mean if the perpetrator is your supervisor compared to your peer? Is how you would respond in the former situation the same as how you would respond in the latter? At a more macro level, this research program on knowledge theft hopes to raise attention to the phenomenon and aims to mitigate its occurrence in organizations. "
"We also would like to acknowledge the feedback we've received from members of the Centre as we've presented many iterations of this project to students and faculty during its development. Thank you for your feedback, support, and advice!"