Knowledge that Transforms

Employment continuity facilitates access to career opportunities, professional growth, and financial security, making involuntary disruptions—such as employer failures—potentially consequential for individuals’ career trajectories. Although prior research has explored how organizational leaders’ careers fare following employer failure, the implications for non-executive employees remain unclear in theoretical terms. Integrating theories of evaluation, evaluative stigma, and careers, we develop a theoretical framework to clarify how employer failure relates to subsequent career outcomes for employees. Using confidential, anonymized data from the United States Census complemented by detailed, identifiable data from the Automatic Speech Recognition industry, we find that employer failure is negatively related to organizational leaders’ wage growth, consistent with internal attribution and evaluative stigma. Conversely, non-executive employees experience wage (and industry retention) outcomes comparable to those of their unaffected peers, suggesting that affiliation with a failed employer does not stigmatize this set of employees. However, non-executive employees are not always unscathed: Career penalties emerge when failure involves a scandal, when industry labor-market conditions become more competitive, and when employees belong to some marginalized demographic groups (gender, race, immigration). By clarifying the conditions of evaluative stigma, we extend organizational research on careers and evaluations, highlighting the conditions under which affiliations with failed firms relate to subsequent career outcomes.

Creative workers often seek a substantial audience for their work. Our findings reveal that a new struggle begins once they attain one. Existing theory fails to account for how creators conceive of and manage the relationship with their audience once their work has gained widespread appeal. In an inductive study of independent creative workers who use digital platforms to share their work, we discovered that after attaining a substantial audience, creators experience audience entanglement: a subjective sense of deep interrelatedness between an individual and the audience for their work such that this relationship becomes a persistent consideration in their approach to creating. This entanglement typically begins as dysfunctional entanglement , characterized by feeling an oppressive dependence on audience reactions, struggling with platform volatility, and experiencing distressing emotions. In this state, creators question the meaning of their work and view platform work as unsustainable. Some creators develop entanglement management strategies —distancing themselves from audience input, depersonalizing audience critiques, and distilling their personal standards—that shift them to a state of functional entanglement , or feeling a balanced dependence on audience reactions, accepting platform volatility, and experiencing uplifting emotions. Functional entanglement allows creators to capture meaning from their audience and to view platform work as sustainable.

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.