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upstart writes in with an IRC submission:

Star employees get most of the credit - and blame:

Working with a "star" employee – someone who demonstrates exceptional performance and enjoys broad visibility relative to industry peers – offers both risks and rewards, according to new research from the ILR School.

In collaborations, stars tend to get more than their share of the credit when things go well -- and more of the blame when projects don't succeed, according to "Shadows and Shields: Stars Limit Their Collaborators' Exposure to Attributions of Both Credit and Blame," published Dec. 10, 2020, by Personnel Psychology.

"We look at what happens when you collaborate with a star in terms of whose getting credit when that collaboration is successful," said Rebecca Kehoe, associate professor of human resource studies. "What we find, and this is consistent with research on the Matthew effect and other work, is that if you collaborate with a star and that collaboration is successful, the star does get more of that credit and you benefit less than if you were working with somebody that wasn't a star. The silver lining here though is that if you collaborate with a star and that collaboration is not successful, the star takes the heat."

[...] Results showed that collaborating with a star reduces the credit -- and gains in professional status -- that non-stars experience in the context of collaborative success. On the other hand, collaborating with a star not only mitigates -- but may actually outweigh -- the professional status loss associated with collaborative failure.

[...] "I think what this points to, both for low-performing employees and for managers," she said, "is the importance of being very mindful of what is the gain that you're hoping to achieve from a collaboration with a star."

Journal Reference:
Rebecca R. Kehoe, F. Scott Bentley. Shadows and shields: Stars limit their collaborators' exposure to attributions of both credit and blame, Personnel Psychology (DOI: 10.1111/peps.12436)

Original Submission