Reputation on the Line: How the Third-Party Dilemma Shapes Trust in High-Risk Work

Despite scholars’ increasing acknowledgment of the role third parties can play in others’ trust decisions, we know very little about what motivates these parties’ information sharing. Our research examines this process via a qualitative, inductive study of linemen: the men and women who work on power lines. We show how features of their work context give rise to a strong reliance on third-party information for trust and strong accountability for third parties who share reputational information. These conditions cultivate what we call the “third-party dilemma”: Linemen feel trapped between desires to keep trustors safe and desires to protect their own reputations. We further explain how the information-sharing practices by which they manage this dilemma ultimately affect the trust triad by allowing third parties to partially safeguard their reputations, encouraging trustors to provisionally grant or withhold trust, and subjecting trustees to either sticky negative reputations or fragile positive reputations. These dynamics encourage lower trust within the triad. We conclude by highlighting the importance of the work context in shaping third-party motives, discussing the trust-related implications of how the third-party dilemma is managed, and redirecting trust research beyond dyadic (trustor–trustee) models of trust.