To Thine Own Self Be True, Or The Organization Would Seem False Too: Personal Inauthenticity Predicts Employee Organizational Cynicism
Dr. Li Huang
Associate Professor
Organisational Behaviour
INSEAD Business School
ABSTRACT
Influenced by a classical philosophical notion that a person’s authentic self is their fount of happiness, organizational scholars have adopted an affective and introspective lens and studied employees’ experience of personal inauthenticity as an obstacle to their own wellbeing and work engagement. Overlooked is a parallel notion corroborated by recent psychology research that people also see their authentic self a source of virtue and inauthenticity a threat to their moral self-concept. Drawing from the distancing account of the self-concept protection theory in social psychology, the current research proposes a two-stage, organization-specific defense response through which organizational members experiencing personal inauthenticity are motivated to espouse organizational cynicism, a negative attitude comprising of the belief that the organization lacks integrity as well as organization-directed negative affect and disparaging behaviors. Adopting a full-cycle research approach, we conducted a cross-lagged survey study, an experiment, and three multi-wave survey studies (with one of them pre-registered) to provide consistent support for our theoretical model and exclude trait cynicism and negative affectivity as alternative explanations. We discuss implications of this defense response for the personal authenticity of organizational members and the moral legitimacy of organizations.
