About

Oliver Schilke is a Professor of Management and Organizations at the Eller College of Management, where he joined in 2014. He also holds a courtesy appointment as a Professor of Sociology and serves as the Director of the Center for Trust Studies. His academic background includes a PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), earned in 2014, and he spent two years as a research fellow at Stanford University’s Department of Sociology. His research interests encompass micro-institutional processes such as trust, routines, and legitimacy, with a focus on inter-organizational relationships, R&D, and entrepreneurship. Schilke employs a variety of methodological approaches, including experiments, surveys, and large archival data sets, to explore these areas. His work contributes to understanding how trust and institutional processes influence organizational behavior and relationships, and he has published extensively on these topics, earning recognition and awards for his research.

Research topics

• Sociology
• Computer Science
• Social Science
• Political Science
• Knowledge management
• Computer Security
• Social psychology
• Epistemology
• Economics
• Psychology
• Public relations
• Positive economics
• Economic system
• Business
• Law

Selected publications

• The transparency dilemma: how AI disclosure erodes trust

  PsyArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-04-07

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  As generative artificial intelligence (AI) has found its way into various work tasks, questions about whether its usage should be disclosed and the consequences of such disclosure have taken center stage in public and academic discourse on digital transparency. This article addresses this debate by asking: Does disclosing the usage of AI compromise trust in the user? We examine the impact of AI disclosure on trust across diverse tasks—from communications via analytics to artistry—and across individual actors such as supervisors, subordinates, professors, analysts, and creatives, as well as across organizational actors such as investment funds. Thirteen experiments consistently demonstrate that actors who disclose their AI usage are trusted less than those who do not. Drawing on micro-institutional theory, we argue that this reduction in trust can be explained by reduced perceptions of legitimacy, as shown across various experimental designs (Studies 6–8). Moreover, we demonstrate that this negative effect holds across different disclosure framings, above and beyond algorithm aversion, regardless of whether AI involvement is known, and regardless of whether disclosure is voluntary or mandatory, though it is comparatively weaker than the effect of third-party exposure (Studies 9–13). A within-paper meta analysis suggests this trust penalty is attenuated but not eliminated among evaluators with favorable technology attitudes and perceptions of high AI accuracy. This article contributes to research on trust, AI, transparency, and legitimacy by showing that AI disclosure can harm social perceptions, emphasizing that transparency is not straightforwardly beneficial, and highlighting legitimacy’s central role in trust formation.

  Publisher

• How does AI disclosure shape trust? Unpacking the role of legitimacy

  2026-04-07

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  As generative artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly adopted, understanding how its usage is perceived has become crucial for theory and practice. Our investigation highlights how disclosing AI usage reduces trust by triggering legitimacy concerns arising from deviations from taken-for-granted human-centered norms. Drawing on a micro-institutional perspective, we unpack legitimacy into its dimensions and propose that they operate via three context-specific processes—perceived typicality, commitment, and authenticity—which jointly account for the erosion of trust resulting from AI disclosure. An initial structured content-analytic study of directed written interviews reveals that people indeed voice these legitimacy concerns when scrutinizing AI usage and addresses research questions about how such concerns manifest across facets. A subsequent vignette experiment shows that disclosing AI usage sequentially diminishes perceptions of typicality, commitment, and authenticity, ultimately lowering trust. A supplementary replication experiment confirms this pattern. Altogether, our investigation clarifies the paradoxical nature of transparency, advances empirical testing of legitimacy theory, and helps bridge the literatures on trust and institutional theory.

  PublisherDOI

• Unpacking the Paradoxes of Trust in Uncertain Times

  Organization Studies · 2026-03-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Trust has been recognized as a foundational pillar underpinning the functioning of organizations and society. However, contemporary developments have unleashed unprecedented uncertainty, challenging established notions of social order and raising urgent questions about how trust will operate in the years to come. A deeper understanding of the interface between uncertainty and trust is needed, elaborating how institutions and advanced technologies offer pathways for building and maintaining trust. Our analysis identifies three core paradoxes: trust–uncertainty, trust–institution, and trust–technology. These paradoxes highlight that trust proves indispensable where it is hardest to build, that trusted institutions falter when uncertainty is high and they are needed most, and that technologies designed to reduce uncertainty can in fact increase it. This special issue curates five studies that illuminate these paradoxes. A qualitative study of whistleblowing reveals tensions in how organizations signal ability, benevolence, integrity, transparency, and identification across stakeholders and over time (trust–uncertainty). A mixed‑methods study of a high court theorizes fidelity mechanisms—recognition, selection, socialization—that stabilize the production of “trust objects” (trust–institution). A multilevel network analysis of a corporate top‑management team shows that shared organizational vocabularies foster trust; when those words align with organizational identity, trust ties traverse unit boundaries (trust–institution). A study of a Covid‑19 mutual‑aid platform shows how digital affordances catalyze institution‑based trust that seeds emotional trust among strangers (trust–technology). Finally, a study of a peer‑to‑peer market shows that accreditation (technology verification) and reputation have opposite effects as cultural distance grows—accreditation narrows trust gaps while reputation can widen them—with implications for inequality (trust–technology). Building on these insights, our editorial articulates across the piece a forward-looking research agenda emphasizing the recursive interplay between trust and uncertainty and calling for research to illuminate the emergent, paradoxical, and often nonlinear patterns of trust development.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• How Does AI Disclosure Shape Trust? Unpacking the Role of Legitimacy

  Social Psychology Quarterly · 2026-04-14

  article1st authorCorresponding

  As generative artificial intelligence (AI) is increasingly adopted, understanding how its usage is perceived has become crucial for theory and practice. Our investigation highlights how disclosing AI usage reduces trust by triggering legitimacy concerns arising from deviations from taken-for-granted human-centered norms. Drawing on a micro-institutional perspective, we unpack legitimacy into its dimensions and propose that they operate via three context-specific processes—perceived typicality, commitment, and authenticity—that jointly account for the erosion of trust resulting from AI disclosure. An initial structured content-analytic study of directed written interviews reveals that people indeed voice these legitimacy concerns when scrutinizing AI usage and addresses research questions about how such concerns manifest across facets. A subsequent vignette experiment shows that disclosing AI usage sequentially diminishes perceptions of typicality, commitment, and authenticity, ultimately lowering trust. A supplementary replication experiment confirms this pattern. Altogether, our investigation clarifies the paradoxical nature of transparency, advances empirical testing of legitimacy theory, and helps bridge the literatures on trust and institutional theory.

  PublisherDOI

• How organizational is interorganizational trust?

  SocArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-04-07

  preprintOpen accessSenior author

  Trust represents a key social mechanism facilitating collaboration in interorganizational relationships. Yet, the concept of interorganizational trust is surrounded by substantial ambiguity, especially as it pertains to the levels of analysis at which it is located. Some scholars maintain that trust is an inherently individual-level phenomenon, whereas others insist that organizations constitute the central sources and referents of trust in interorganizational relationships. Our article addresses this controversy, aiming to reduce conceptual ambiguity and foster cumulative progress. Using a micro-sociological approach, we advance knowledge of the meaning and context-specific relevance of individual- vs. organizational-level trust. Specifically, we apply the notion of organizational actorhood to both the trustor and the trustee in an interorganizational relationship. We then build on micro-institutional and entitativity theory to offer a model of the antecedents of organizational actorhood that identifies a set of contextual conditions explaining the degree to which an organization rather than individuals within it constitutes the focal origin and target of trust. The contingent account we propose here helps bridge disparate traditions of scholarship on interorganizational trust by highlighting that trust can, but need not always, reside to a substantial extent at a supraindividual level of analysis.

  Publisher

• Legitimacy construction in the presence of multiple validity cues: An experimental investigation

  SocArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-04-07

  preprintOpen access

  How actors construe legitimacy perceptions of their social environment has been subject to considerable interest in social psychology and organization studies, with much research focusing on how collective validity cues inform individual propriety judgments. However, this research has either focused on one validity cue at a time or has assumed that multiple validity cues are congruent, thereby overlooking the complex interactions that may occur between different types of cues. In this chapter, we address this limitation by investigating the differential effects of validity cues on propriety judgments contingent on cue type (authorization versus endorsement), cue valence (positive versus negative), and the evaluator’s subject-matter expertise (low versus high). We report a vignette experiment involving a LinkedIn site of a fictitious deep-sea mining company. We find main effects of cue valence and cue type, such that positively valenced cues lead to higher propriety judgments whereas negatively valenced cues lead to lower propriety judgments, and both effects are stronger for authorization than for endorsement cues. Our findings provide important contributions to legitimacy research by demonstrating the importance of theorizing and systematically studying the role of multiple and potentially conflicting cues in the formation of legitimacy.

  Publisher

• Legitimacy construction in the presence of multiple validity cues: An experimental investigation

  2026-04-07

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  How actors construe legitimacy perceptions of their social environment has been subject to considerable interest in social psychology and organization studies, with much research focusing on how collective validity cues inform individual propriety judgments. However, this research has either focused on one validity cue at a time or has assumed that multiple validity cues are congruent, thereby overlooking the complex interactions that may occur between different types of cues. In this chapter, we address this limitation by investigating the differential effects of validity cues on propriety judgments contingent on cue type (authorization versus endorsement), cue valence (positive versus negative), and the evaluator’s subject-matter expertise (low versus high). We report a vignette experiment involving a LinkedIn site of a fictitious deep-sea mining company. We find main effects of cue valence and cue type, such that positively valenced cues lead to higher propriety judgments whereas negatively valenced cues lead to lower propriety judgments, and both effects are stronger for authorization than for endorsement cues. Our findings provide important contributions to legitimacy research by demonstrating the importance of theorizing and systematically studying the role of multiple and potentially conflicting cues in the formation of legitimacy.

  PublisherDOI

• AI Disclosure and Trust - Qualitative Study

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-01-27

  other1st authorCorresponding
  Publisher

• Unpacking the Paradoxes of Trust in Uncertain Times

  SocArXiv (OSF Preprints) · 2026-04-06

  preprintOpen access

  Trust has been recognized as a foundational pillar underpinning the functioning of organizations and society. However, contemporary developments have unleashed unprecedented uncertainty, challenging established notions of social order and raising urgent questions about how trust will operate in the years to come. A deeper understanding of the interface between uncertainty and trust is needed, elaborating how institutions and advanced technologies offer pathways for building and maintaining trust. Our analysis identifies three core paradoxes: trust–uncertainty, trust–institution, and trust–technology. These paradoxes highlight that trust proves indispensable where it is hardest to build, that trusted institutions falter when uncertainty is high and they are needed most, and that technologies designed to reduce uncertainty can in fact increase it. This special issue curates five studies that illuminate these paradoxes. A qualitative study of whistleblowing reveals tensions in how organizations signal ability, benevolence, integrity, transparency, and identification across stakeholders and over time (trust–uncertainty). A mixed‑methods study of a high court theorizes fidelity mechanisms—recognition, selection, socialization—that stabilize the production of “trust objects” (trust–institution). A multilevel network analysis of a corporate top‑management team shows that shared organizational vocabularies foster trust; when those words align with organizational identity, trust ties traverse unit boundaries (trust–institution). A study of a Covid‑19 mutual‑aid platform shows how digital affordances catalyze institution‑based trust that seeds emotional trust among strangers (trust–technology). Finally, a study of a peer‑to‑peer market shows that accreditation (technology verification) and reputation have opposite effects as cultural distance grows—accreditation narrows trust gaps while reputation can widen them—with implications for inequality (trust–technology). Building on these insights, our editorial articulates across the piece a forward-looking research agenda emphasizing the recursive interplay between trust and uncertainty and calling for research to illuminate the emergent, paradoxical, and often nonlinear patterns of trust development.

  Publisher

• Unpacking the Paradoxes of Trust in Uncertain Times

  2026-04-07

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  Trust has been recognized as a foundational pillar underpinning the functioning of organizations and society. However, contemporary developments have unleashed unprecedented uncertainty, challenging established notions of social order and raising urgent questions about how trust will operate in the years to come. A deeper understanding of the interface between uncertainty and trust is needed, elaborating how institutions and advanced technologies offer pathways for building and maintaining trust. Our analysis identifies three core paradoxes: trust–uncertainty, trust–institution, and trust–technology. These paradoxes highlight that trust proves indispensable where it is hardest to build, that trusted institutions falter when uncertainty is high and they are needed most, and that technologies designed to reduce uncertainty can in fact increase it. This special issue curates five studies that illuminate these paradoxes. A qualitative study of whistleblowing reveals tensions in how organizations signal ability, benevolence, integrity, transparency, and identification across stakeholders and over time (trust–uncertainty). A mixed‑methods study of a high court theorizes fidelity mechanisms—recognition, selection, socialization—that stabilize the production of “trust objects” (trust–institution). A multilevel network analysis of a corporate top‑management team shows that shared organizational vocabularies foster trust; when those words align with organizational identity, trust ties traverse unit boundaries (trust–institution). A study of a Covid‑19 mutual‑aid platform shows how digital affordances catalyze institution‑based trust that seeds emotional trust among strangers (trust–technology). Finally, a study of a peer‑to‑peer market shows that accreditation (technology verification) and reputation have opposite effects as cultural distance grows—accreditation narrows trust gaps while reputation can widen them—with implications for inequality (trust–technology). Building on these insights, our editorial articulates across the piece a forward-looking research agenda emphasizing the recursive interplay between trust and uncertainty and calling for research to illuminate the emergent, paradoxical, and often nonlinear patterns of trust development.

  PublisherDOI

Recent grants

• CAREER: Bilateral Extensions to Studying Trust in Organizations

  NSF · $500k · 2020–2026

Frequent coauthors

• Martin Reimann

  59 shared

• Karen S. Cook

  26 shared

• Fabrice Lumineau

  15 shared

• Jacquelyn S. Thomas

  Southern Methodist University

  14 shared

• Bernd W. Wirtz

  German University of Administrative Sciences

  11 shared

• Lynne G. Zucker

  University of California, Los Angeles

  11 shared

• Malte Brettel

  WHU – Otto Beisheim School of Management

  10 shared

• David Kroon

  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam

  7 shared

Education

• PhD

  UCLA Department of Sociology

  2014

• Postdoctoral Research Fellow

  Stanford University Department of Sociology

  2009

• Doctor rerum politicarum (D.B.A.)

  Universität Witten/Herdecke Fakultät für Wirtschaftswissenschaft

  2007

• Diplom-Kaufmann (Master of Science in Management)

  Leipzig Graduate School of Management

  2003

• Vordiplom (Intermediate Diploma in Business Administration)

  Universität Siegen Fakultät Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftsinformatik und Wirtschaftsrecht

  2001

Awards & honors

• Dean's Research Award, Eller College of Management (2021)
• Most Novel Paper, Strategic Management Society Annual Confer…
• CAREER Award, National Science Foundation (2020)
• Ascendant Scholar Award, Western Academy of Management (2020…
• Emerging Scholar Award, Strategic Management Society (2019)