Eller Professor Wins Prestigious National Science Foundation CAREER Award

Oliver Schilke, assistant professor of management and organizations in the University of Arizona Eller College of Management, has been awarded a National Science Foundation (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development Program (CAREER) award.

The CAREER program is a foundation-wide activity that offers the NSF’s most prestigious awards in support of early-career faculty who have the potential to serve as academic role models in research and education and to lead advances in the mission of their department or organization.

Schilke’s project studies the role of trust in organizations. The project has three major areas of focus: to understand the circumstances under which people make accurate trust decisions; trust asymmetries, or situations in which one party places high trust in the other whereas the other party places low trust in return; and the extent to which people know that they are being trusted. The results of this project will significantly contribute to researchers’ knowledge of how trust evolves in organizational settings.

“Eller faculty, staff and students are proud of Schilke for receiving this prestigious award from the NSF,” says Aleksander Ellis, Stephen P. Robbins Chair in Organizational Behavior and department of management and organizations head. “His research will help us better understand the importance of trust between individuals in an organization and how to build that trust, which is especially important as more organizations are moving towards virtual work environments with reduced levels of in-person interaction.”

Oliver Schilke joined the Eller College of Management in 2014 after earning his PhD in Sociology from the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). He also had the opportunity to spend two years as a Research Fellow at Stanford University’s Department of Sociology. Schilke’s research interests can be summarized along the following three dimensions: At a theoretical level, he studies microinstitutional processes such as trust, routines and legitimacy. At a substantive level, his research addresses interorganizational relationships, R&D and entrepreneurship. At a methodological level, he utilizes experiments, surveys and large archival data sets.