In many organizational settings, individuals make evaluations in the context of affect-based negative relationships, in which an evaluator personally dislikes the evaluated individual. However, these dislikes are often held in check by norms of professionalism that preclude the use of personal preferences in objective evaluations. In this article, we draw from social network theory to suggest that only individuals that are network brokers—those who have the cognitive freedom to flout organizational norms—act to down-evaluate the peers they dislike. We evaluate our theory using two complementary studies: one field site study and an experiment. Our results, consistent across two different methodologies, suggest that overlooking an evaluator’s negative relationships as well as the network positions that constrain or enable an individual’s actions may lead to distortions in ubiquitous organizational peer evaluations processes and outcomes.

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在许多组织环境中，个人在基于情感的负面关系的背景下进行评估，其中评估者个人不喜欢被评估的个人。然而，这些厌恶往往受到专业规范的限制，这些规范排除了在客观评估中使用个人偏好的可能性。在本文中，我们借鉴社交网络理论表明，只有作为网络经纪人的个人（那些拥有藐视组织规范的认知自由的人）才会采取行动来贬低他们不喜欢的同伴。我们使用两项互补的研究来评估我们的理论：一项现场研究和一项实验。我们的结果在两种不同的方法中是一致的，表明忽视评估者的负面关系以及限制或促进个人行为的网络位置可能会导致普遍存在的组织同行评估过程和结果的扭曲。

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