A stellar reputation earned on a successful project or the handling of a workplace crisis can make a career. Getting “cancelled,” meanwhile, because of an offhand comment, or developing a slow-burn bad rap due to unconscious bias can sour someone’s work life, even causing them to quit.

Companies might want to better understand what makes or breaks a reputation. But if they look to the research, they’ll find that a wide range of fields look at how people are perceived by others that all use different lingo, and it’s difficult to turn theory into action.

“Everybody’s studying reputation, but not necessarily as ‘reputation,’” says Brian Connelly, associate professor of organizational behaviour and human resources management at the University of Toronto. “There’s a lot that goes into creating someone’s reputation that we haven’t really started to pick apart.

To begin to tease out the different aspects how reputation impacts people in the workplace, Connelly and co-author Samual McAbee, of Bowling Green State University, dove into the existing related literature for a review article recently published in the annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behaviour.

Reputation at work

The paper confirms that being liked, respected, admired or believed (or not) affects job performance, career success and wellbeing.

People who are conscientious and agreeable perform well in the workplace, but some traits matter more for certain occupations. For instance, agreeableness helps a customer service professional, but less so a security guard.

Causality remains unclear: Connelly says positive personality traits and reputation could lead to strong job performance, or maybe it’s the other way around, and hard work feeds a positive reputation. Research has shown that people with good reputations move up the ladder, but it has yet to link how specific aspects connect to outcomes such as promotions and salaries.

The connection between reputation and psychological wellbeing has been studied, but Connelly notes there are big gaps in the literature, and more needs to be done. Currently, it seems there’s a feelgood connection between how much your reputation and your self identity line up, as that feeds into authenticity. So, if you think you’re funny, and others think so too, that creates a positive feeling. “But it raises interesting questions about whether this holds for negative traits, too,” says Connelly.

Meanwhile, companies want to avoid hiring people with so-called dark triad personality traits — narcissism, psychopathy and Machiavellianism (being manipulative and lacking empathy and morality). “When you first meet them and for the first 20 or 30 minutes, they seem so charming and friendly, and it falls off months later. And think about how long job interviews are.” Having tools to measure reputations, early on, could help avoid hiring a sweet-talker who secretly has these qualities.

Theories at work

Reputations are tricky to measure because it’s all about “the complex ways that accuracy and error intertwine in person perceptions,” the researchers write. And while Connelly and McAbee propose new measurement model — the “Trait-Reputation-Identity Model” — it’s still very much at the theoretical, research level. (Traits are characteristics that can be confirmed through consensus from different metrics. A reputation is what others say. Identity is what a person thinks about themselves.)

While some of the metrics that feed into their preferred model have a practical side, there’s more work to be done to help companies assess reputations on the ground.

“We’re hoping to put out a tool that can stitch these different literatures together,” Connelly says.

For instance, a tool could help companies add targeted approaches — such as questions, scenarios or tests — to hiring interviews or 360 reviews that help them understand the reputation of the person at hand.

Tools that assess reputations on an organizational level would also be useful in helping leaders understand how personalities, perceptions, rumours, stereotypes and other factors have impacted a department or entire company.  “You could find out why people are choosing to leave,” says Connelly.

Future footholds

While tools and tests could help companies take employee reputation into account, Connelly still wants to know more about why some people have a good rap, and others a bad one. “Some of the most understudied parts of the reputational literature is what is the thing that changes or shifts reputations. There’s this notion that they’re really fragile,” he says. When street cred takes a positive spike, or suddenly no one likes a person, such a change can be career-defining, and worth understanding. “How do you catch lightning in a bottle? It’s one of the least known things about reputations.”