A foreman on a power line crew typically gets two to three days' notice before a new worker arrives on site. In a job that ranks among the deadliest in the country, that window is all he has to decide whether to let that person join the crew or send them back. So he does what linemen across the country do: he makes a phone call.
That phone call, and everything riding on it, is what Luke Hedden wanted to understand. Hedden, assistant professor of management at the University of Miami Herbert Business School, studied electrical power line workers extensively for research published earlier this year in Administrative Science Quarterly. The paper, coauthored with Michael Pratt of Boston College, examines how people in genuinely dangerous work decide who to trust, with findings that have implications for how trust works in any high-stakes workplace.
Line work turned out to be an almost perfect setting for studying trust. The job is dangerous, mistakes are often fatal, and almost all of it is done in small, tightly coordinated crews where most tasks require at least two linemen working in close tandem. Those crews are constantly changing, assembled from contractors who may never have met, leaving little time to build trust. So they rely on what others tell them.
But the people being asked, the third parties, aren't simply passing along information. They have their own reputations on the line, operating inside the same tight network they're being asked to comment on. The dilemma they face is rooted in something real: a genuine responsibility to keep colleagues safe, and an equally real risk that a wrong call could cost them their own standing. Hedden and Pratt call it the "third-party dilemma."
"If you recommend someone and their actions lead to an individual getting hurt, that comes back on you," Hedden said. "It can cost you your reputation, and in this occupation, your reputation is how you find work."
That tension shapes everything about how information gets shared. When linemen believe someone is unsafe, they say so directly. But when they think someone is competent, they are careful to frame it as personal experience rather than a broad endorsement — "while I worked with him, this is what I saw" rather than "he's a good hand." That way, if the person later falls short, they haven't put their own reputation on the line for them. "They overshare the negative and under share the positive to be honest while still protecting themselves," Hedden said. "And ultimately, that has a negative impact on trust in the occupation."
For the workers being evaluated, not all reputations are created equal. Redemption stories are rare. A single mistake, not a pattern and sometimes not even a serious incident, can follow a lineman from job to job across the country. "They rarely ever even get a chance to prove themselves or earn back anyone's trust," Hedden said.
This system, although helpful in protecting workers, may also be working against them. Linemen described persistent crew shortages while available workers were being passed over. Hedden sees that as the price of a system that has conditioned itself to err heavily on the side of caution.
The same dynamic can be found in other workplaces: when asked about a colleague, people are far more likely to speak up confidently when they have something negative to say than positive. Traveling nurses, emergency response teams, and workers in project-based industries all likely know some version of this problem.
For managers, the research offers something useful. The third-party dilemma doesn't happen because people are dishonest — it happens because they're afraid of being blamed. When an honest endorsement is treated as a guarantee rather than a good-faith assessment, people stop giving them. But when people feel safe sharing what they genuinely know without fear of being held responsible for how it turns out, information gets more balanced, trust decisions get better, and teams get stronger. "The information you think you're getting and the information you're actually getting can be two very different things," Hedden said. "Understanding why that gap exists is the first step toward closing it."
Hedden is already at work on the next phase of this research, focusing on another dimension of the linemen experience: the feeling that their work is invisible right up until the moment it isn't. For the people keeping the lights on for millions of Americans, understanding that experience, he believes, is the next step toward building workplaces where the people doing the hardest work get the recognition, and the trust, they've earned.
