Article Abstract
To deepen understanding of social judgments of organizations, we build on work that has adopted the evaluator’s perspective to develop a comprehensive functional approach to social judgments. We identify a set of adaptive challenges faced by evaluators in their relationship with organizations and theorize how the judgments they make can help resolve those challenges. In doing so, we clarify how social judgments are rooted in comparisons between the organization’s properties and some social referent, and extend understanding of the interrelated nature and complementary role of diverse social judgments. We explain how social judgments—such as legitimacy, trustworthiness, reputation, status, and authenticity—form a robust system of interrelated judgments that allows evaluators to collect and triangulate multiple judgments of different types, using judgment inputs from three different sources: (1) first-hand inputs, based on the evaluator’s own observations and information about the organization; (2) borrowed inputs, based on judgments made by others; and (3) taken-for-granted judgment inputs acquired through the evaluator’s socialization and education. We conclude by suggesting ways to reorient research toward unduly neglected elements of social judgment theory through systematic examination of the functional utility that social judgments provide for evaluators.
Academy of Management Review, February 2025
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About the researcher
Nicole Gillespie is an internationally recognised scholar on trust in organisations. She holds the Chair in Trust and is Professor of Management at Melbourne Business School and the Faculty of Business and Economics at the University of Melbourne. Nicole is also an International Research Fellow at the Centre for Reputation at Oxford University, Honorary Professor at the University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences in Australia and the Australian and New Zealand School of Government.
Trained in organizational psychology and management, Nicole's research focuses on trust development and repair, particularly in contexts where trust is challenged (e.g. after a trust failure, in complex stakeholder environments, during digital disruption, and in cross-cultural relations). Current projects focus on trust in artificial intelligence and the responsible adoption and governance of AI, stakeholder trust and evaluations of organizations, organizational trust repair, and leading trustworthy organizations.