I’ll never forget when mom asked me—a mere teen at the time—why I wasn’t more confident. As if confidence were something you could conjure up from thin air.

It would take me several years to figure out that confidence was a byproduct of liking yourself. And when you like yourself, you signal to others that you are someone worth liking. Isn’t that a trip?

There’s some science to back the notion that you receive what you project, albeit from a slightly different angle: our status. Today, we look at professor Derek Rucker’s research on the vicious cycle of status insecurity.

Status insecurity: a self-fulfilling prophecy?

The world is replete with podcasts, books, and articles on how to address and overcome insecurities over our status, but Rucker and his coauthors wanted to understand what caused status insecurity, how it affected people’s behaviors, and whether those behaviors improved or hurt their status.

The researchers hypothesized that people who are insecure about their status are less willing to share credit for their successes—a behavior rooted in the belief that one’s gain is another’s loss.

To test their hypothesis, they took a mixed-method approach that included secondary data analyses, content analyses, and experiments. They also examined instances of status insecurity across various settings, including transcripts from a reality TV show, consulting pitches, a venture-capital competition, and an idea-generation contest.

They found that people who were insecure about their status believed that status was a limited resource, which made them reluctant to acknowledge how others might have helped them get there.

In contrast, giving others credit boosted the status of both the sharer and the recipient, expanding the overall status pie. This means that people who withhold credit can actually miss opportunities to boost their own status.

To quell this behavior in the workplace, the authors recommend that organizations start by training people to understand that sharing credit is a boon for everyone involved—not a limited resource to be hoarded. Leaders can give the practice additional credence by modeling it themselves and by publicly praising employees who do it consistently.

“By revealing the self-sabotaging consequences of status insecurity, we hope our research inspires people to step out of their insecurities,” the authors write.

Read more about his research in Inc., and find the paper here.