RESEARCH
I am an organizational scholar who studies ethics in the workplace. My research seeks to understand when people make surprising—even counterintuitive—moral judgments. Across my work, I examine questions such as: When do we judge organizations as authentically good? When do we think of gossipers as good people? And when might behavior that is objectively unethical nevertheless be perceived as morally right?
My research can be classified into two streams. In my first and primary line of work, I study both the morally charged attributions we make at work and about work. In this research, I investigate various contexts and individual differences (like political ideology or loyalty tensions) that may influence moral judgments and lead to unexpected outcomes, such as socially rewarding harmful rule breaking. As a secondary research stream, I also study how an organizations ethical culture can be shaped socio-political pressures, and how ethical cultures in turn shape employees’ values.
My work has been published in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Research in Organizational Behavior, Social and Personality Psychology Compass, and Policy Insights from the Behavioral and Brain Sciences; as well as invited for revision in the Journal of Business Ethics. I also have work under review at premier outlets such as Personnel Psychology. I employ diverse methods – archival analyses, field and lab experiments, and qualitative approaches – while maintaining a strong commitment to rigorous and transparent scientific practices.
Work in Progress
When are gossipers seen as good people?
2026 JOB MARKET PAPER
Workplace gossip – a commonplace form of informal communication in the organization…defined as the evaluative talk about a third party who is absent 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.
What does it mean for Organizations to be Authentic?
Alexandra Figueroa, Jesse Graham
This work investigates how political ideology influences how perceivers make attributions of authenticity when organizations signal values. We propose that authenticity judgments are co-constructed by both the signal’s features (e.g., consistency) as well as value-congruence, or the degree to which the espoused value aligns with one’s ideological orientation. Across two correlational studies of real organizational value signals and one experiment (all preregistered), we show evidence there are independent effects of congruence with one’s political ideology and consistency over time on whether one believes a signal to be authentic even over signal attributes such as monetary spend (e.g. donation to the value). We do not find strong evidence that signal costliness (measured as monetary spend and reputational risk) influence perceptions of authenticity. Finally, we investigate these effects in the context of a current phenomenon – organizational rollbacks of diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI) values. We find that recent organizational rollbacks (e.g. inconsistency) have set back perceptions of organizational authenticity, and thus organizational attraction, among both liberals and conservatives. By identifying the ways in which liberals and conservatives may diverge or converge on how they make judgments about signals, this research aims to help organizations manage polarized responses to their values.
Witnesses have dualing psychological responses to mistreatment
Preprint now available! https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/8zhwg
Amelia Stillwell, Alexandra Figueroa, Elizabeth Tenney, Tamara Calzado Real, Ariel Blair
In three studies of employees from diverse racial backgrounds (i.e. White, Black, Latine, East Asian), we examine the pressures placed on employees who witness racial mistreatment towards others. We predict that such incidents shape perceptions of the work group that extend beyond the focal interaction, with consequences for willingness to voice. We find that, rather than simply lowering psychological safety and inhibiting voice, witnessing racial mistreatment also inspires feelings of responsibility to enact change, which is associated with stronger voice intentions. Thus, witnessing racial mistreatment gives rise to tension between impulses to withhold and express voice. This risk-responsibility pattern was observed across all racial groups studied, including non-target racial minorities and dominant group members. Our results shed light on conflicting past findings about witnesses’ responses to racial mistreatment, advancing the field’s understanding of witnesses’ layered psychological responses to workplace racial mistreatment, and the reverberating impact on willingness to voice.
