Secrets, trust, and transparency: Navigating between influence and accountability as trusted intermediary

Abstract

Secrecy is usually considered destructive to trust. However, people are often involved in conflicting social commitments in which transparency to one trustor may violate the trust of others. Georg Simmel suggests that secrecy can serve important social purposes; consequently, strategically balancing transparency and secrecy can be conducive to social cooperation and building intersubjective trust. This is particularly the case for trusted intermediaries tasked with building trust in multiple conflicting relations. In this study, we investigate how shop stewards actively navigate the transparency–secrecy nexus as trusted intermediaries to build trust and gain maximal influence over management decisions. The study is based on qualitative interviews with 29 shop stewards within the Danish care sector. Shop stewards depend on co-worker trust and transparency, whereas their influence on management requires secrecy and trust, which makes shop stewards vulnerable to criticism and mistrust from their co-workers. This study shows that transparency and secrecy are important trust work tools for creating and maintaining trust, processes that require efficient compartmentalisation of issues, roles, and contextual meaning in separate formal and informal spaces of collaboration with management to avoid co-worker suspicion or conflict with management.