Why are reputations so important?

Your reputation can be defined as “a perceptual identity formed from the collective perceptions of others.” It reflects a complex combination of your personal characteristics, accomplishments and demonstrated behaviour over a period of time — as observed from secondary sources.

There are some very good reasons to pay attention to your reputation. At the individual level, reputation has been linked to power, career advancement, greater autonomy and other positive results. People are motivated not only to become their ideal selves, but also to convince others around them of this image. This psychological desire for a positive personal reputation exists in order to fill a basic human need for both self-fulfillment and self-esteem.

What are some of the key outcomes of a great reputation?

Recent research regarding personal reputation shows that individuals with powerful reputations in organizations are granted benefits for holding those reputations. These include autonomy, power and career success — and these things work together to increase one another as well as the individual’s reputation.

Autonomy within an organization will increase if an individual has a powerful personal reputation because the organization feels less of a need to monitor that person’s activities as closely as they might otherwise. In addition to receiving increased autonomy, individuals with strong personal reputations may also be rewarded with increased power. Such phenomena occur because of the desire of others to be associated with individuals who have positive reputations.

Career success is yet another outcome of personal reputation. One study showed that workplace achievements are based more on social factors than they are on objective performance measures. This suggests that those with powerful reputations are able to use them in a way that influences those around them. Even when objective measures are utilized, personal reputation has been shown to be related to actual performance.

On the other hand, people might develop positive social reputations for being likeable, but audiences may not see likeability as a reason to grant the rewards I mentioned. Likewise, some individuals who possess great technical skill may gain a certain level of autonomy, but may not necessarily advance in their chosen career. Although reputation has been shown to be typically advantageous, it does not automatically equate to success.

Are all the aspects of one’s reputation observable?

In the research on personality, identity and reputation are considered separate aspects of the personality. Reputation is the outward part and identity is that internal world. There are definitely parts of people that others don’t have access to. Just think about how people process emotions. Research shows that when their reputation matches how they see themselves, people are happier. In terms of the workplace, the thing people care most about is task performance. My Rotman colleague Maria Rotundo has studied this and found that people care about an individual’s ability to perform the various aspects of a job and do them well. The research also shows that reputation can be based upon more than just the tasks that one performs as part of their job. It can also be based, for instance, on social aspects such as being ‘the life of the party’ or having a high degree of integrity.

When considering social reputations, research suggests that those who are highly politically skilled often develop social reputations in which they are fast-tracked — sometimes beyond their technical abilities. There is also a darker side to reputation that Maria has studied: ‘counterproductive’ work behaviour. Are you aggressive with co-workers? Are you bullying people? These are things that get weighed heavily in the workplace.

Can people "manage" their reputation?

There’s a lot of research on "impression management" — whereby people proactively try to manage the way they’re seen or project a particular reputation as a way to gain status. This is a key aspect of workplace politics. People manage their reputations for good reasons and bad. For some, it can become pretty Machiavellian. They will be manipulative and use whatever means necessary to make themselves look good. But impression management isn’t always bad; if you’re trying to build a reputation for positive organizational ends, that isn’t problematic.

Social media is a relatively new phenomenon in the area of reputation. Social networking sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn enable people to connect and share information about themselves and their organizations with a large number of others online. These platforms have the potential to empower individuals and have some effect over their personal reputation. For example, they allow individuals to strategically manipulate their reputation by regulating the type of information that they display to others (i.e. ‘signalling’). Social media can also help to satisfy the need to belong because it allows individuals to embed themselves within a community of relevant others.

What if someone feels that their reputation is unwarranted or unfair?

There isn’t a lot of research on this, but I would say in these cases, a useful thing to do is to start by taking stock of the situation. Ask yourself, “Is there something I should be attuned to that I might be missing?” Next, figure out where the reputation is emanating from. Did a particular person or group make a harsh judgment of you based on one particular thing that happened? In some cases, you can then address it directly. Say to the people involved, “I know I have a reputation for this, but I think it’s coming from this one thing, and I would really appreciate another chance.”

Reputations exist within a defined context, whether it be a family setting, a friendship setting or a workplace setting. Are they usually consistent across contexts?

In order to understand how reputations occur, you need to look at the behavioural norms of the context. What might be unusual in one organization or family may be very commonplace in another. My co-author Michael Wilmot and I just submitted a study that looks at this on a large scale. We found that there is definitely an overlap between the different contexts. The way family members or friends see a person lines up reasonably well with how that individual’s colleagues see them. There can be aspects of the way your friends see you that are different from how others see you, but we did find consistency overall.

Someone’s personality can be judged from two different perspectives: by the person themselves and by someone else. We also found that self-judgments and judgments made by others show some agreement, but it is typically moderate. That is, there are some things about our personality that everyone agrees on, but there are also things that only we think about ourselves (our identity) or that only others think about us (our reputation). For example, other people can only observe what we do and say, whereas only we also know what we are thinking and feeling.

Tell us a bit about your TRI Model.

Our Trait-Reputation-Identity Model defines three different areas of insights that can exist for a target individual.

The ‘trait bucket’ contains knowledge that both the self and others share. The ‘identity bucket’ contains the target’s unique self-perception — insights that only the target holds and does not share with others. And the ‘reputation bucket’ contain insights about the target that are shared by others but are independent of the target.

What are some quick ways to damage a reputation?

I touched on counterproductive work behaviour earlier, and that swings reputations pretty quickly. It includes any kind of interpersonally directed counterproductive behaviour towards other people. Once you’ve broken trust on this front, it’s really hard to get it back. There is also organizationally directed counterproductive behaviour, which can range from minor things like absenteeism and withholding effort to theft, sabotage and vandalism.

You have found that gossip plays a significant role in reputations. How so?

Although an individual is able to control his or her actions and may thus have some influence over their reputation, it is ultimately determined by an audience of others. And one of the primary mechanisms by which an audience determines a reputation is by observing deviations in behaviour that go beyond what organizational norms prescribe. In such cases, the audience transfers these observations to others by disseminating gossip. Unlike information that is received directly from an individual attempting to create their reputation, information received through gossip is more readily believed and accepted by an audience of others.

Although gossip may be viewed as a negative aspect of organizations, in the context of personal reputation, it is a necessary component. Gossip contains an evaluative component regarding its subject, and this is crucial for developing and maintaining a reputation.

What do great individual reputations do for an organization?

Because there is often uncertainty as to the level of trust that should be granted to an individual employee, organizations look to reputations in order to decrease ambiguity about the individual. For example, if someone has a reputation for successful innovation, it can be assumed that this behaviour will continue once they join a new organization.

“Signaling” is another benefit of reputation-building that is shared by both individuals and the organization as a whole. Like individuals, organizations can signal their intentions though actions. For example, the entry of an individual with a positive reputation sends a positive signal to the audience. In the marketing arena, positive signaling communicates a message to consumers and competitors that the organization is responding to market expectations. Back when Apple’s sales were slumping in 2005, the company brought Steve Jobs back, and the market responded positively. Jobs was widely reputed to be an innovator, a reputation that Apple was losing at the time. By associating themselves with him, Apple was able to signal its intent to ramp up innovation.

How can leaders embrace all of these findings?

Given the importance of reputations for people’s success and well-being, reputation assessments may provide a valuable feedback and coaching tool for organizations of all types. Multisource (i.e. 360-degree) performance feedback represents one manifestation of such feedback that is already widely adopted, but developmental feedback could benefit from more breadth in the reputation elements assessed. For example, assessing workplace personality and reputation might provide greater context and direction for an individual who struggles to meet deadlines by identifying whether the root of the issue is an inability to manage stress versus perfectionistic fixations versus procrastination/unreliability. Contrasting reputational assessments with self-reports can also be a powerful tool for identifying individuals’ blind spots.

At a more macro level, organizations could analyze demographic differences in reputational assessments as a mechanism for identifying stereotypes and barriers for protected groups. For example, finding that your organization’s female employees’ reputations for being emotional consistently exceed corresponding self-reports might point to specific negative workplace stereotypes that you can take active steps to redress. Even beyond personnel selection, organizations can benefit substantially from incorporating a broader base of reputational assessments for their existing employees.

This article originally appeared in the Fall 2024 issue of the Rotman Management magazine. Subscribe now for the latest thinking on leadership and innovation.