Why Authentic Workplaces Are More Ethical
People want to feel authentic at work. If an employee or candidate cares about the environment or access to education or being a caring parent, for example, they don’t want their professional responsibilities to interfere with these values or force them to compromise on them. They want to feel like they can express who they are fully at work, without being judged negatively or missing out on development and advancement opportunities; that’s the idea of enabling people to bring their “whole selves” to work. But aligning the values your company represents with those of the employees within it is also important for a very specific reason: it helps prevent ethical lapses. Recent research suggests that enabling people to bring their whole selves to work endows them with a greater sense of authenticity that ultimately leads to more ethical behavior, reducing business risk.
People want to feel authentic at work. If an employee or candidate cares about the environment or access to education or being a caring parent, for example, they don’t want their professional responsibilities to interfere with these values or force them to compromise on them. They want to feel like they can express who they are fully at work, without being judged negatively or missing out on development and advancement opportunities; that’s the idea of enabling people to bring their “whole selves” to work.
This general concept has gained momentum of late because of the large number of Millennials in the workforce. In fact, this population segment now represents the greatest proportion of the U.S. workforce of any generation: as of 2017, a full 35% of U.S. employees was Millennials, just ahead of Generation Xers (about 33%) and well ahead of Baby Boomers (25%). And Millennials are known for their strong focus on consuming and working for brands with values that match their own.
But aligning the values your company represents with those of the employees within it is also important for a very specific reason: it helps prevent ethical lapses. My recent research with Mahdi Ebrahimi and Vanessa Patrick suggests that enabling people to bring their whole selves to work endows them with a greater sense of authenticity that ultimately leads to more ethical behavior, reducing business risk.
Across four studies (about 800 participants total), our research found that low identity integration led to greater feelings of inauthenticity and, in turn, a higher likelihood of engaging in unethical behavior.
That result emerged from an experiment in which we randomly assigned people to conditions that either promoted a sense of identity integration or did not. Specifically, we informed our participants that every person has “multiple selves or identities”: as a typical professional, they have two major identities, a “professional/work” identity and a “non-work” identity. We then prompted each individual to think about these two identities as either segmented/incompatible or integrated/compatible, and to give an example of a specific time they experienced the identities in this way.
We found that participants thinking about their identities as segmented/incompatible (low integration) felt more inauthentic, and engaged in more dishonest behavior compared to those prompted to think about integrated/compatible identities (high integration). The low-integration group, in this case, was more likely to cheat in reporting how many coin tosses they predicted correctly than was the high-integration group.
In a separate, workplace-based survey study we showed that employees (across industries) who reported lower identity integration felt more inauthentic and were more likely to behave unethically, as measured by their supervisors’ reports of their workplace misconduct. For example, supervisors rated the likelihood the employee would engage in dishonest financial (e.g., “falsified a receipt to get reimbursed for more than they spent on business expenses”) and social (“played a mean prank on someone at work”) behavior.
Our overall finding, then, is that low identity integration — or an inability to be one’s whole self — leads to feelings of inauthenticity that are associated with unethical behavior in the workplace and elsewhere. That makes it worthwhile for employers to help employees bring their whole selves to work.
Here are several practical ways to promote identity integration for your people.
Give them some control. Enabling employees to take control — or craft — key elements of their responsibilities goes a long way to boosting their sense of authenticity. Such “job-crafting” can extend to tasks, relationships and interactions (such as mentorships and meetings), and even how employees think about their roles.
Explicate—and live—your mission and values. Making your organization’s mission and values clear helps connect employees better to these, and should go well beyond posting them on the wall or talking about them in the annual report. Living by stated values means sharing stories of them in action, recognizing people for exemplifying them, and working with suppliers and other partners who share them. Employees notice when business practices go against the organization’s mission or values, so look for obvious or more subtle (such as valuing “respect” but allowing negative interactions between supervisors and employees) ways that might be happening.
Promote transparency about process and policy. In line with the point above, how things are done should be clear to everyone in the organization, whether in regard to hiring, promotion, supply chain, or other areas. A stated policy of transparency, with the actions to back it up, is a key part of the authenticity employees value and need.
Don’t force it. Be wary of making everything about fulfilling needs for authenticity. Not everyone may feel strongly about identity integration, especially employees from more senior generations. So seek to promote the mission and values, for example, but don’t force people to share their whole selves in all interactions. There’s a limit to the value of frequent team-building exercises, for instance. Recognize there will be heterogeneity among employee needs, and work to understand and address these the best you can, on a person-by-person basis.
The takeaway here is that understanding the value of authenticity in the workplace and taking active steps to promote it can reduce the risk of unethical behavior in your business. In short, fulfilling people’s need for identity integrity will serve your organization’s need for strong ethics on every front.
Maryam Kouchaki is an assistant professor of management and organizations at Kellogg School of Management, Northwestern University. Her research focuses on decision making and ethics.
Why Authentic Workplaces Are More Ethical
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