Merit is not self-revealing.
Talent becomes visible through assessment systems, evaluators, and definitions of potential. Each introduces judgment, and each can reproduce dominant ideas about competence and status.
Organizational scientist · Researcher · Advisor
Organizations don't discover merit.They decide who counts.
I study the architecture of legitimacy—the hidden systems that determine whose talent is recognized, whose claims are believed, whose contributions are valued, and whose misconduct is overlooked.
Organizational outcomes are rarely the product of individual choices alone. They are the predictable consequences of the systems organizations adopt—and the assumptions those systems reinforce.
Legitimacy is an organizational resource.
People do not enter decisions with equal credibility. Organizations create the rules that determine whose expertise, concerns, performance, and harm claims are treated as worthy of action.
Good systems must work under real conditions.
A practice that works only for conventional jobs, advantaged workers, or unusually attentive leaders is not a general solution. It is a sampling artifact with better branding.
Jenn Griffith, PhD · Organizational scientist and Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the University of New Hampshire.
About Jenn
Research grounded in how organizations really work.
I study how organizations decide who counts. My research examines the hidden systems that shape whose talent is recognized, whose ideas are trusted, whose leadership is rewarded, and whose misconduct is overlooked.
Before becoming a researcher, I worked in human resources and across public and private sectors. That experience continues to shape my work, which combines organizational science with practical solutions for organizational leaders, policymakers, and anyone else designing systems that work for real people.
My research has appeared in the Journal of Organizational Behavior, The Leadership Quarterly, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, and Human Resource Management Review. I advise organizations ranging from small businesses to Fortune 100 companies.
Research
The systems that distribute recognition, opportunity, and accountability.
These research programs examine different organizational decisions, but they share one premise: outcomes that appear individual are often produced by recurring institutional rules.
Merit, Talent & Assessment
How hiring and evaluation systems produce gaps between demonstrated performance and perceived fit, including research on veterans, neurodivergent applicants, AI-enabled assessment, and systematically misread talent.
Core question: Who is underestimated because the system measures the wrong thing?
Leadership, Status & Opportunity
How gender, status, crisis, and organizational signals shape leadership selection, performance interpretation, promotion, and the freedom to deviate from expectations.
Core question: When is difference treated as evidence of value rather than risk?
Organizational Accountability
Why organizations recognize some misconduct while minimizing, containing, or normalizing other behavior—and how status, standards, narratives, and accountability infrastructure shape those responses.
Core question: Whose harm becomes organizationally actionable?
Work Design & Inclusion
How schedule protection, flexibility, disability accommodation, postpartum infrastructure, and coordination shape whether people can remain healthy, effective, and included at work.
Core question: What does flexibility mean when work is time-locked and embodied?
Occupational Health & Moral Injury
How work-related value violations threaten integrity, trust, legitimacy, and moral self-regard—and why traditionally positive attachments such as loyalty, calling, and commitment can intensify the damage.
Core question: What happens when doing the job requires violating what makes the work meaningful?
Research that travels
Ideas should leave journals.
Jenn translates organizational science for leaders, policymakers, professional communities, and the public. Her work has informed organizational policy, legal proceedings, executive education, and workplace practice.
01Peer-reviewed research
02Public scholarship and media
03Organizational policy and legal proceedings
04Executive education and leadership practice
05Research partnerships and system redesign
ABC News
Business Insider
Fast Company
Forbes
Newsweek
NPR
Psychology Today
Reuters
Research and practice
Four ways to bring the evidence into the room.
Research
- Architecture of legitimacy
- Merit, talent, and assessment
- Leadership, status, and opportunity
- Organizational accountability
- Work design and inclusion
- Occupational health and moral injury
Advising
- Talent assessment and hiring systems
- Leadership and organizational decision-making
- Workplace accountability and culture
- Work design, inclusion, and employee experience
Speaking
- Who Counts at Work?
- Meritocracy Is Made Up
- The Architecture of Legitimacy
- Building Organizations People Can Trust
Media
- Organizational accountability and workplace misconduct
- Leadership and organizational decision-making
- Talent systems and workplace merit
- Work design and employee experience
- Women’s workplace experiences
MERIT Lab
How organizations decide who counts.
A research collective studying the structural and psychological mechanisms through which talent is identified, developed, and constrained within organizations.
Research built for use
Rigorous organizational science focused on consequential workplace systems.
The MERIT Lab examines the formal and informal architectures that shape organizational life: assessment systems, leadership pathways, accountability practices, relational dynamics, and work design. The lab focuses on how these systems can reinforce—or disrupt—dominant assumptions about merit, potential, competence, credibility, and status.
Talent systems
How selection, assessment, evaluation, and development practices identify some forms of capability while obscuring others.
Leadership pathways
How status, gender, uncertainty, and organizational signals shape who receives leadership opportunity and how performance is interpreted.
Accountability systems
How organizations decide which conduct, failures, and harm claims warrant recognition, protection, correction, or consequence.
Work systems for real people
How jobs, schedules, accommodations, and coordination practices function under the conditions employees actually face.
How the lab works: MERIT Lab projects combine theory, field partnerships, organizational data, experiments, surveys, qualitative research, and public scholarship. The goal is not merely to document workplace problems, but to produce evidence that can improve organizational decisions.
Recognition
Scholarship built to change organizational decisions.
2026 Mid/Senior Career Outstanding Researcher Peter T. Paul College of Business and Economics.
2025 Paul College Impact Award Recognition for engagement with meaningful community impact.
2025 UNH Faculty Scholar Award University-level recognition of sustained scholarly contribution.
Research Excellence Awards Recipient of the 2021 Research Excellence Award and 2023 Research Excellence in Business Analytics Award.
Partner on a project
Better systems start with better questions.
Whether you are redesigning hiring, improving talent systems, responding to misconduct, supporting working parents, or rethinking leadership, the goal is the same: build systems that deserve the trust people place in them.
Applied research partnerships
Organizational diagnostics
Evidence-based program design
Leadership and team briefings
Data interpretation and strategy
Research translation