My research examines how leadership and social hierarchy shape behavior, judgment, and well-being in organizations. I am interested in a core tension of organizational life: influence is necessary for coordination, but the ways people gain and exercise influence can also produce unintended costs for employees, teams, and broader systems. I study how influential actors secure deference, how observers infer motives, morality, and trustworthiness from those influence cues, and how these judgments shape ethical conduct, career mobility, work-family spillover, cooperation, diversity initiative support, and perceptions of inequality.