In some areas of life, trust is very important, including on
the job. Even in occupations that are mostly safe, every now and then there may
be dangerous situations in which trust in others is important. Trust matters
because danger triggers a fight-or-flee dilemma: you can try to solve the
problem, at some risk to yourself, or you can escape and let the problem get
worse. When solving a dangerous problem calls for teamwork, it is important
that everyone makes the same decision.
This type of trust is the inspiration behind a recent paper in Administrative Science Quarterly by Michael Pratt, Douglas Lepisto, and Erik Dane. They looked at firefighters, whose occupation calls for risky teamwork.
They have to trust that others will “have their back” in fighting a fire when
the situation gets dangerous, so that each can rely on the other. Firefighting
is especially interesting because firefighters don’t actually spend much time
fighting fires. The increased fire safety of buildings and the need to have enough
firefighters on the payroll in case of large fires means that they spend most
of their time waiting for calls or handling emergencies that have nothing to do
with firefighting. Helping cats down from trees is mostly a myth, but vehicle
accidents, gas leaks, and emergency medical assistance are facts of life – firefighters
can often get to a scene before the ambulance.
The problem with having safe buildings is that firefighters
have little direct evidence from fighting fires together of whom they can trust
– when they’re called to the scene of a fire, they may not have ever seen each
other fight fires. That means they have to operate on trust derived from
indirect evidence. I started by saying that trust is well studied and little
understood. One thing we do know is that when people try to decide whom to
trust, they look for signs of trustworthiness. When this happens in
occupations, the signs may not make sense to outsiders, but they are very real
for the people involved. The firefighters in this research tried to understand
where their colleagues were coming from, both in their backgrounds and in their
attitudes toward the everyday chores at the firehouse. Based on small or large
signs they picked up in their early interactions with a newcomer, they would
put the newcomer into a small set of categories. And here is where the
interesting part lies, because the categories did not inspire the same amount
of trust.
The firefighter who has a college education? That one is the
“book-smart” type and is not a commonsense
type whom you can trust to think quickly and do the right thing in a dangerous
situation. The firefighter who buys his own scanner and goes to fires even when
he’s off duty? That would be a “spark,” who has the right motivation but is too
excitable and thus is only warily trusted.
Less trusted is the “paycheck” firefighter, who is there for only one
reason and likely won’t take risks to help a fellow firefighter out of a burning
building. So who is trusted most? For firefighters it is the “worker” type, who
they see as always reliable and careful – someone who combines the
professionalism of a (good) plumber with the discipline of a soldier, who
checks the equipment, cleans up, or does whatever else needs to be done when
there are no calls. So the answer to the question of who do you trust is that
if you are a firefighter, you probably don’t fully trust the colleague who is just
book smart, the one excited by fires, or the one who’s there for the paycheck.
If you are not a firefighter, the answer to the question is
different. You don’t know who to trust, and you can’t tell who is of what type.
That’s part of how organizations work, because they contain occupations and
jobs that have internal codes understood by few others, including management.
That’s one reason why managers should be careful not to judge quickly when they
see behaviors they don’t understand. Look inside the thinking of the people
responsible, and things make more sense.
