Work is where the majority of adults spend most of their waking hours. It is also, research shows, where they feel least authentic. That contradiction has been treated largely as a personal problem. But what if the consequences extended beyond the individual?

This question motivated my research with Eric Y. Lou (NEOMA Business School). What we found is unsettling. Inauthenticity does not just drain employees – it activates them. Rather than suffering passively, people cope with it actively and that coping response is directed squarely at the organisation itself.

Inauthenticity as an active propagator of cynicism 

Most people believe they have a true self and that their true self is fundamentally good and moral. Behaving contrary to that – even when nothing formally unethical has occurred – feels like a violation of something virtuous. 

This creates a moral self-concept threat. Threatened egos mobilise defensive responses. The most direct response is to do something genuinely virtuous: help a colleague, push back on an unfair decision, speak up. But that takes effort and carries risk, whereas critiquing others costs nothing. The organisation, which determines the values operating at work, is the most obvious target.

So rather than stopping at "the organisation's values are different from mine," the employee concludes "this organisation's values are wrong and morally inferior to my own." This defensive reasoning fuels organisational cynicism – the belief that the company and its leaders lack integrity and will go to any lengths to serve their own interests. The employee restores their moral self-concept by delegitimising the organisation. It costs the employee nothing in the short term, but the organisation pays in the long run.

Sneers, suspicions and disparagement

Our conclusions rest on six studies involving 2,844 participants drawn from 47 countries. We used experimental and longitudinal methods, with instruments designed to capture cynicism as observable behaviour.

In one study, participants responded to a workplace group chat about a CEO media interview by selecting emoticons from a set of 20. Compared to those who felt authentic, those who felt inauthentic were more inclined to reach for the sneers and eye-rolls. In another, they interpreted positive organisational initiatives addressing social responsibility, environmental responsibility and employee well-being not as genuine expressions of values but as self-interested manoeuvres. In another, when drafting emails to prospective hires and in conversation with new hires about the workplace, they used language of moral condemnation and emotional negativity, choosing words such as "exploit," "dishonest" and "betray" over words such as "integrity" and "dignity". 

The effect held even after accounting for whether participants were naturally distrustful of others' motives (trait cynicism), generally prone to negative emotions (trait negative affectivity) or simply in a bad mood on the day (negative affect). In other words, this is not about naturally cynical or negative people gravitating to cynical workplaces. Nor is it about negative feelings spilling over to all judgments indiscriminately. It is a specific, situationally triggered response to the experience of feeling inauthentic.

Contagious, cumulative and existential

When people attribute positive organisational initiatives and other forms of organisational support to an ulterior motive, their willingness to engage drops. The very initiatives designed to signal the organisation’s moral compass become evidence of its absence. Employees’ cynical reading of, and withdrawal from, organisational initiatives accelerate the spread further, not least by their influence on coworkers. 

More troubling still, cynicism accumulates. Cynical employees are, paradoxically, less likely to leave. The assumption that things will be no different elsewhere keeps them in place, disengaged but present, while their attitudes spread through teams. The difference between a team going through the motions and one putting in genuine effort may not be easy to pinpoint, but you feel it. The former may still hit its targets. It will not innovate, take risks or deliver the effort that separates organisations that thrive from those that survive.

Worse, the spread and accumulation of cynicism can damage the organisation’s legitimacy, which rests largely on its moral status. This is typically built through everyday conversations happening inside the organisation. When those turn subversive, as our study shows, this hollows out the organisation’s moral authority. A legitimate organisation enjoys genuine support. An illegitimate one struggles to function or attract stakeholder support. 

Treasure, trust and train

What can organisations do to tackle this? If your organisation’s values resemble BP’s in the 2000s or Boeing’s in the last decade, then raising authenticity requires a full cultural overhaul. But employees can feel inauthentic in organisations with a solid moral compass too. Leaders can tackle feelings of inauthenticity with a social-relational approach. Here are three concrete, evidence-based solutions:

Treasure the humanity in your people. Organisations invest considerable resources in recruitment and then frequently fail to create conditions in which recruits experience their true selves at work. With inclusion and psychological safety at risk of becoming performative gestures, the focus should shift to something more fundamental: humanity. 

Treasuring employees can simply mean appreciating their humanity, including the human need for social connection. Research consistently finds that behaving in an extraverted way feels more authentic, even for introverted individuals. Indeed, how do we define who we are from within and in isolation? Our sense of who we are is shaped by the people around us, those we differ from as much as those we identify with. Providing employees with the resources and cultural signals that facilitate social connections is an investment whose returns go far beyond team cohesion.

Trust your people and they will, in turn, trust you. The most straightforward way to combat organisational cynicism is to demonstrate integrity through words and decisions. Another related approach is to help employees see a fit between personal and organisational values. Yet however carefully leaders communicate values or practice organisational justice, perfect alignment between institutional and personal values is impossible. Tellingly, simply assigning importance to a contentious issue, even if disagreeing on how to handle it, can already elevate your employees’ true self, signal integrity and build trust. 

Train your people to take a relational approach with authenticity and cynicism. Self-leadership training can prove beneficial and should extend beyond those in leadership roles. It can help them recognise that if they define themselves in relational terms, authenticity doesn’t require maintaining a single, uniform self. It can derive from honouring the identities co-constructed with others, including the difficult manager at their first job, the overly-ambitious colleague whom they once relied on, or the team clown whose moments of levity kept the group afloat. It can also help them understand that cynicism is a poor coping mechanism: it is associated with lower intelligence, draws reciprocal disrespect and does little to restore the moral self-concept it was meant to protect.

Most leaders think about inauthenticity as an individual concern. Our research suggests its consequences extend well beyond the individual. The conditions organisations create for people to feel authentic at work shape how people think, speak and behave on the organisation's behalf. Don’t ignore workplace inauthenticity until it’s too late.