Virtual Trust in High‐Reliability Organizations

ABSTRACT Although much is known about trust in organizations, questions remain on how trusting relationships may develop in high‐reliability organizations that depend on information technology in their routine operations. Because of their dispersed operations, operational staff of high‐reliability organizations such as the armed forces in this article may often only interact virtually. Based on military field operators' accounts of a “near‐miss incident” at a military airbase in Afghanistan, the article explores how organizational trust can be activated in a high‐reliability organization during an armed conflict by drawing on actors' use of a non‐face‐to‐face form of “virtual” trust. In the article's case study of virtual trust, field operators with no prior interaction jointly took preventive action to head‐off a potentially catastrophic incident without authorization from their manager. We theorize that operators acted successfully by maintaining a state of constant operational readiness in an environment of virtual trust. A framework of operational readiness is presented for high‐reliability and other organizations whose activities risk significant public harm. Implications of virtual trust are presented for practitioners and researchers in enabling frontline operators to act beyond hierarchical constraints for the preservation of the organization and its environment.