In every organization, trust is the invisible currency that enables people to collaborate, innovate, and perform under pressure. But trust doesn’t exist in a vacuum—it’s shaped by reputation, and reputation is shaped by what others see and say. The moment someone is perceived as unreliable or insincere, trust erodes. The moment their actions reinforce integrity and follow-through, trust grows.
Understanding how reputation works—and how it spreads—can help leaders build stronger, more resilient cultures. Especially in hybrid and remote environments where people rely more on signals than shared experience, knowing how to make trust visible is not optional. It's essential.
What Is Trust?
Rachel Botsman, a leading expert on trust and technology, defines trust as "a confident relationship with the unknown." In the workplace, trust allows individuals and teams to take small and large leaps—whether it's delegating a task, collaborating on a project, or sharing sensitive information. Without trust, friction increases, communication slows, and psychological safety erodes.
Organizational trust is often described in two dimensions:
- Competence: Can you do what you say you'll do?
- Character: Can I count on your intentions and integrity?
Trust forms when people have confidence in both. These qualities are judged not just by direct experience but also by reputation.
Reputation Shapes Trust. But Not All Reputation Travels Equally.
Trust in the workplace is built through consistent signals of competence and character. These signals form a person’s reputation. Reputation, in turn, is the lens through which others decide whether to rely on you, collaborate with you, or support your growth. It's not only based on direct experience, but also what others see, hear, or believe about you. In organizational settings, reputation acts as a shortcut for trust when personal interactions are limited or incomplete.
However, not all reputation spreads in the same way. Research across organizational psychology, behavioral science, and network theory consistently finds that negative reputations spread faster, stick longer, and do more damage than positive ones. This asymmetry has serious implications for how trust is built (or lost) at work.
Negative Signals Travel Faster Than Positive Ones
In a field study of call center employees (Ferrali, 2025), researchers found that just one month of exposure to a dishonest colleague led to a 5 percentage point increase in dishonest behavior among peers. In contrast, exposure to honest coworkers had no meaningful effect on improving behavior. This suggests that bad behavior, once observed, is not only noticed—it is contagious.
Social network studies reinforce this. In a workplace analysis by Ellwardt et al. (2012), researchers found that negative gossip was more centralized and concentrated than positive gossip, meaning bad reputations spread more directly and efficiently within teams. Positive reputations, by contrast, were more diffuse and took longer to take shape.
In large-scale digital ecosystems like Twitter, the same dynamic holds. A study by Vosoughi, Roy, & Aral (2018) found that false (often negative or sensational) information spread to 1,500 people six times faster than true information. The implication is clear: people are more likely to share, react to, and remember reputational signals that are negative or alarming.
A meta-analysis of 56 studies on workplace gossip by Wu et al. (2023) revealed another insight: negative gossip has over twice the impact on attitudes and behaviors compared to positive gossip. In short, once someone gains a negative reputation—whether justified or not—the effects are stronger and more durable than those of a positive one.
Trust Takes Time. Distrust Takes a Moment.
Trust doesn’t form from a single interaction. It accumulates through repeated, consistent evidence of reliability and integrity. Yet, it can be lost almost instantly. A missed deadline, a broken promise, or a moment of dishonesty can undo weeks or months of positive impressions.
This imbalance is known as the "negativity bias": people give more weight to negative information than positive (Baumeister et al., 2001). From an evolutionary standpoint, this makes sense—negative signals may indicate risk or danger. In the workplace, it means that the burden of proof for being trustworthy is high, while the threshold for being distrusted is low.
For individuals, this means that building trust requires intentionality. For teams and organizations, it means that trust can't be left to chance. Without deliberate reinforcement, trust falters in the face of ambiguity or limited visibility.
Why Hybrid and Remote Work Amplifies the Challenge
The shift to hybrid and remote work has made the dynamics of reputation more complex. In co-located teams, people observe each other’s behavior informally: they see who shows up on time, who helps others, who keeps their word. Small, positive actions accumulate and become part of someone's reputation.
In distributed settings, those touchpoints are fewer. The spontaneous hallway chat, the visible follow-through in meetings, the quiet act of support—these behaviors are often invisible in remote work. That makes it harder for positive reputation to form and spread.
However, negative reputation still spreads easily. Rumors, frustrations, and perceived slights travel through Slack channels, email threads, or private calls. Without informal context to balance perceptions, people may assume the worst. And because negative signals travel faster, they disproportionately shape impressions in remote teams.
In effect, hybrid and remote environments weaken the channels that transmit trust and leave open pathways for doubt and gossip. Unless organizations intervene, this imbalance will persist.
Recognition Is the Infrastructure for Positive Reputation
Recognition, when designed intentionally, helps counteract the asymmetry in reputation dynamics. It does more than express appreciation—it creates the conditions for positive reputation to travel.
When recognition is timely, specific, and visible, it surfaces actions that reflect competence and character. It tells a micro-story about trustworthiness: "This person delivered under pressure." "They helped a teammate succeed." "They modeled integrity in a tough moment."
These signals accumulate and spread. They build a person’s reputation in the eyes of others who may not directly work with them. In this way, recognition functions as a distributed trust-building mechanism.
In remote and hybrid teams, this function is critical. Recognition replaces the lost surface area of daily observation. It gives others a reason to believe in someone they rarely see. It also signals what the organization values, reinforcing cultural norms.
Designing for Trust: Practical Recommendations
If trust is essential, then it must be designed into the fabric of the workplace. Based on the research, here are three practical ways to accelerate trust-building through reputation:
- Make Positive Behavior Visible
Create lightweight systems to regularly recognize actions that reflect competence and character. Peer recognition platforms, shoutouts in team meetings, and feedback rituals all help surface reputation signals. - Use Network Bridges to Share Reputation
Trust often remains siloed. Encourage cross-team visibility by enabling trusted individuals (managers, cross-functional leads) to share stories of positive behavior beyond their immediate teams. This helps reputation travel. - Reinforce Through Repetition
Trust grows through frequency and consistency. Structure work and rituals to allow for recurring demonstrations of follow-through, empathy, and integrity—not just one-off acknowledgments.
To Build Trust, Design for Reputation
To build trust in your workplace, don’t wait for good reputation to spread on its own. Design for it.
Recognition is a scalable, research-backed mechanism to ensure that trustworthy behavior is seen, shared, and repeated. It helps balance the natural bias toward negative information and gives people the reputation they’ve earned—and others the confidence to rely on them.
In a world where trust is easily lost and rarely seen, building a reputation for integrity and competence isn’t just good culture—it’s good infrastructure.
