Reputation at work: Who do your colleagues think you are?

Rotman Executive Summary

Professor Brian Connelly joins the podcast to discuss the psychological complexities of workplace reputation and how it differs from self-id

Key takeaways

• The trait personality reputation model identifies three zones: identity (self), trait (shared), and reputation (others' view).
• Positive reputations correlate with increased autonomy, trust, power, and promotion opportunities in the workplace.

Main topics

• Definition of reputation
• The trait personality reputation model

Notable quotes

Your reputation is who you are, how you present yourself to the world, how people interpret your personality.

Conclusion

While managing a reputation is difficult and limited by others' percep

Transcript preview

Speaker 1 (0:00) So I study personality and I tend to study it from how other people see our personality. It's a fascinating thing. These are our reputations. Like on one hand, we're told, oh, you should really think about people's character when you're deciding who to trust, who to hire, these kinds of things. On the other hand, you tell people, don't worry about how people judge your character. We spend all this effort building up reputations, but it feels like they're so fragile. that they could collapse with like a single instance of behavior. Speaker 2 (0:34) That's Brian Connolly, an associate professor at the University of Toronto Scarborough with a cross-appointment to the Rotman School of Management. Over the course of his career, he's developed an, ahem, reputation as the expert on reputations. How accurate are other people at judging us? What makes a good reputation? And how can it impact your long-term career? And while I think we instinctively know our reputations are important, how important are they really? Can they prevent us from getting that promotion? Spoiler, yes, and we'll get to that in a bit. How in line are they with how we see ourselves? And if they can actually impact our long-term career success, can we change our reputations for the better? Welcome to The Executive Summary. I'm your host, Megan Haines, editor of the Ramen Insights Hub. Speaker 2 (1:23) So what exactly is reputation, and how do we get one? It seems like a simple answer. Your reputation is who you are, how you present yourself to the world, how people interpret your personality. Of course, it's a bit more complex than that. How you see your personality and think you're presenting yourself to the world can be very different from how other people are interpreting those representations. Speaker 1 (1:43) So if you can kind of imagine like a Venn diagram of this is how I would describe myself, and this is how someone else would describe me. And that overlap, that's basically the stuff that we agree on about me. We'll call that the trait. And that's how you're generally seen and how you see yourself. That's the part we all agree on. Then there's the part of you that only you see. And we call that the identity. And that maybe has some parts that's like narcissistic kinds of tendencies or maybe self-deprecating kinds of tendencies where you don't believe in yourself quite as much. Then there's the reputation side. This is the unique version of yourself that other people see. This maybe isn't stuff that you're aware of, but this is the way that you come across towards other people. Speaker 2 (2:33) This is a model Brian and his colleagues developed called the trait personality reputation model. And it's a way for us to think about that disconnect between how you see yourself and how others see you. Speaker 1 (2:42) People have these tendencies to over or underestimate their positive qualities that we know. We all know that person that thinks they're way better than they really are. I think of like Michael Scott from The Office as like a classic example of this guy who has this really overly inflated view of himself. And that tends to lead him down some destructive paths. He kind of alienates people because they don't buy necessarily into his identity, as we'd call it. Speaker 2 (3:13) Reputation is the bird's eye view of how other people see your personality, rather than your more limited view of how you see yourself. Importantly, Brian's research tells us that reputation is a shared perception. It's not just one person who believes you're trustworthy that gives you a reputation of being trustworthy, but rather a group of people holding that belief. That's good news, since we don't