Alexandra
FIGUEROA, Ph.D.
I am a Postdoctoral Scholar at the University of California Berkeley, Haas School of Business. I study organizational values and moral judgments
Research Spotlight
2026 JOB MARKET PAPER
Good Friends Share (and Bad Friends Don’t): Moral Judgments of Gossipers at Work
Workplace gossip – a commonplace form of informal communication in the organization…defined as the evaluative talk about a third party who is absent (Zhong et al., 2025) is largely perceived as an anti-social and immoral act which individuals have a distaste for and managers seek to prevent. However, information sharing is hugely influential in organizational processes. The dominant perspective of gossip overlooks a moral tension employees must reconcile: people want to maximize their access to information and reduce ambiguity about their workplace, and therefore may assign moral value to those who share interesting information. This work investigates this tension by considering when gossiping is judged as moral or immoral. We find that this effect is conditional on closeness, such that, while distant gossips are in fact seen as immoral, for close others, gossiping may in fact be a moral imperative.
Buckets under a Leaky Roof...
Alexandra Figueroa, Merrick Osborne, Sa-kiera Hudson
Hierarchies permeate our working lives via manufactured inequality that is not always visible. Merging bodies of work that identify and describe systems of oppression, we develop a framework that illuminates the cascading influence of such socio-historical factors on organizational processes. We integrate sociological, institutional, and systems psychodynamics theories to document how arbitrary hierarchies influence everything from how organizations form to interpersonal interactions. The literatures converge on a single, sobering logic: because organizations are embedded in—and seek legitimacy from—their broader socio-historical contexts, the same arbitrary hierarchies that stratify societies are naturally imported into organizational life. In doing so, we clarify the most appropriate applications of common terminology used to describe the experiences of disadvantaged groups (e.g., discrimination, marginalization, minoritization). Specifically, we redirect scholars’ usage of the term “microaggressions” away from the subtlety of the microaggression (which has been the focus of past research in this topic) to highlight their origin in – and maintenance of – hegemonic organizational power structures. We then utilize this framework to generate recommendations to help organizational leaders “stop the leak” or ameliorate the influence of hegemonic hierarchies in their workplace.
GALLERY
About Alexandra Figueroa, Ph.D.
I am a Postdoctoral Scholar in Racial Equity at University of California Berkeley, Haas School of Business. Currently, I study the inclusion of marginalized populations in organizations, and how such topics are influenced by individual and organization-level moral systems.