The Fragility of Reputation

Reputation plays an important role in our lives and has a particularly impactful significance in our success at work. How others think of us affects how they relate to us. Yet the flood of information coming from multiple channels makes it particularly tricky to manage one’s professional reputation today. Why have we defaulted to relying on unsubstantiated information in lieu of verified data for assessment?

We have all seen people “cancelled” as a result of unreliable information disseminated through social media and the plethora of pipelines pumping out data to us 24/7. Why have we defaulted to this clearly faulty manner of assessment? SmarterWisdom posits that people have become inured to doing their best to stay on top of torrents of unmanageable quantities of information across many dimensions of their lives and failing. As a result, many of us have been effectively moved toward relying on available (some might say unavoidable) information, oft repeated, rather than relying on the quality of that information as a major determinant of what we come to believe. 

This shift has a very serious impact on the quality of our judgement calls. In a context of swirling, unvetted information, we have become used to making  decisions about all manner of things without accurate—or complete—information: who among us hasn’t chosen a new restaurant based on on-line reviews from people we don’t know? Instead of depending on the source of the information to determine its quality, this phenomenon pushes us toward reliance on the quantity of similar reactions.  “If everybody thinks so, it must be true,” has become an underpinning of our thought process. 

Research on successful executives has long identified their ability to make decisions without complete information as a component of their effectiveness. That certainly was true when the information they were working from was well-vetted for high quality. It is unclear yet whether the growing acceptance of unevaluated information is affecting executive decision-making. But the trend certainly gives us pause.

How might this shift in assessing information play out in the important arena of one’s professional reputation? Certainly, how others see us is frequently the jumping off point from which workplace communication and interaction springs. We work with colleagues, bosses, subordinates, new hires, customers, peers and others near and far. We have personal knowledge of them to widely varying degrees. 

Many of us rely on reputation to fill in the gaps in our knowledge.  “I hear Sue is a real bear when she’s hungry,” or “Julie told me to never tell Jason anything you don’t want everyone else in his department to know.” We may not have ever been with Sue when her stomach began to growl, but multiple exposures to that information may be sufficient to lead to her characterization as “The Hungry Horror” on the gossip mill. 

For most of us, work involves a large system of interactions and information exchanges with others. Rarely do any of them remain solely with us or fully disappear. Rather they are cumulative. Imagine putting drops of red food coloring into a clear glass beaker half filled with yellow-colored water. When the first red drop enters the beaker, it just barely tints the yellow water. If red drops continue to be added, at some point there will be sufficient red liquid to cause an observable effect, moving toward the liquid eventually appearing to be virtually red. That result was not due to one specific drop, rather it is cumulative. 

Reputations are particularly subject to cumulative impact. If someone makes a comment to you about the poor quality of person X’s work, you may pay little attention.  But when you hear the comment a second or third time, you may recall that that is not the first time you’ve heard that to be the case.  If you continue to hear or see evidence in support of what you’ve already heard, its weight accumulates. As with the red drops, eventually that repetition causes a change in your perception of the state of X’s performance, all based on what you’ve heard from others.

Not only are reputations cumulative, they are also self-perpetuating. The cumulative phenomenon sets further dynamics in motion that serve to amplify a perception until it becomes what “everybody knows.” Once the reputational seed is planted, it is tough to ignore your new foundational belief about X; you have entered a new stage where that belief causes confirmation bias, where what you expect to see causes you to look for and frequently find it.  Adding those highlighted behavioral sightings to your “beaker” strengthens your foundational belief. 

It also makes the origins of that belief even more opaque; in the case of reputation management, the widespread introduction of AI to our workplaces may exacerbate this phenomenon.

As is typically the case in any system, the introduction of a new element frequently generates unintended consequences. Recent research suggests that, in the course of several studied AI implementations, new opportunities for reputational threats at work have been generated. Here are two examples:

In a survey of over 1,000 US employees reported in the Jan./Feb. 2026 Harvard Business Review, many respondents indicated that they send and receive poor quality AI generated content. Coined “workslop,” this communication was viewed as egregious and is found to be particularly negative when it results in unnecessary work on the part of the recipient. (The report offered “AI-written emails that require follow-up” as an example.)

In response to the question “How did receiving workslop change your perception of your colleague?”, 54% of respondents saw them as less creative, 50% saw them as less capable, 49% deemed them less reliable, 42% viewed them as less trustworthy and 37% saw them as less intelligent.  Clearly, using AI badly provides fodder for a reputational hit.

The second example builds on this theme. In a 2025 working paper, Phyliss Jia Gai, Jialy Hou and Yanping Tu reported on results of research done in partnership with a large global tech organization, The company had introduced a new AI coding tool to almost 30,000 software engineers. After a year, only 41% of them were using it.

They ran an experiment to understand why so few people were using the new AI tool. A group of 1,000+ company engineers were asked to review a segment of code; they were told it had been written by another engineer, either with or without the help of AI. In some groups, the reviewers were told that the engineer was a woman, while others were told it was a man.

Once again, the results revealed something the researchers hadn’t been looking for: several forms of bias.  “When the reviewers believed the code was written with the help of AI, they rated the engineer’s competence 9% lower than the unaided engineer’s. Women faced the steepest penalty---they were considered 13% less competent when they used AI.”  Worse, male engineers who said they didn’t use AI were especially harsh critics of women who did: they rated them 26% less competent than the male engineers who used the AI tool. 

This is not a condemnation of AI: it is a call to active investigation into biases which are revealed in the course of its implementation. But it is also an illustration of the subtle dynamics at work that can influence an individual’s reputation.

Individuals who wish to protect their professional reputation will have to rethink the dynamics at play in today’s workplace to identify where inaccurate or false information is being generated. The sources may be much less obvious than simple water-cooler gossip. 

It is a steeper challenge than ever, but likely worth the vigilance. SmarterWisdom would counsel that it is still easier to keep a good work reputation than to repair one that has been damaged. Our mantra: do good work, speak well of others and try to consistently (and concretely) project the values you wish to be central to your reputation.  

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