Authenticity, Well-Being, and Engagement Make Work AWEsome
By Anna Sutton
University of Waikato. November 15, 2023.
We spend a substantial portion of our lives at work: nearly 90,000 hours over a lifetime. It is no surprise then, that our existential concerns of seeking meaning, connection, and authenticity are as important in the workplace as in the rest of life. The popular business press regularly releases new articles on the importance of authenticity at work (e.g. Forbes, HBR, Financial Times) because authentic workers are great for their employers. They contribute more ideas and effort, are more productive, and seek out learning opportunities (Friedman & Lobel, 2003). And the benefits of authenticity at work even extend to customers: customers who interact with more authentic workers report higher satisfaction (Yagil & Medler-Liraz, 2013). It’s perhaps no surprise that authenticity is such a buzz word in business right now.
Lady Gaga’s Born This Way, is one of the bestselling singles of all time and she describes it as an anthem - a call to action - to accept and be ourselves. But the idea that authenticity is important is not new. In fact, we can trace it back at least as far as Socrates, who held that knowing and being true to ourselves was essential to living a good life (Harter, 2002). More than two thousand years later, psychological research has confirmed that people of all ages continue to value feeling authentic, want others to be authentic, and that authenticity is important to our overall well-being (Hicks et al., 2019).
Well-being is our overall assessment of how well our life is going, including physical and mental health as well as the quality of our relationships with other people. As the global understanding of economic success has expanded to include the effects of organisations on employee and societal well-being rather than just the bottom line, work organisations and governments are increasingly putting well-being front and centre in their policies. New Zealand, for example, was the first country to introduce a Wellbeing Budget to ensure that the government considers the long-term impacts of their policies on people’s quality of life.
Similarly, organisations are seeking ways to improve employee engagement. When we are engaged in our work, we feel energised, enthusiastic, and put in more effort (Schaufeli & Bakker, 2010). Organisations with engaged employees have a greater profitability and customer satisfaction (Saks & Gruman, 2014). When we are more engaged, we are more productive, more likely to stay in our job, and have better well-being.
Authenticity, well-being, and engagement are inter-related elements of living a good life. And many of us are looking for what I like to call AWEsome work—that is, work that encourages us to be Authentic, supports our Well-being, and builds Engagement in our jobs.
Authenticity, Well-being, and Engagement
We’ve seen evidence that being authentic, or true to ourselves, is directly associated with better well-being and engagement at work. There is also research showing that authenticity can indirectly affect both of these outcomes. For example, being authentic can help reduce the negative effect of having a more psychopathic boss (Sutton & Stapleton, 2023) and when employees are more authentic, company-level initiatives such as social responsibility efforts can have a stronger impact on their engagement (Glavas, 2016). But are these effects robust or might they just be unique to the specific groups of people who took part in those studies?
In a meta-analysis of 75 studies, Sutton (2020) found that authenticity was positively associated with both well-being and engagement.
To answer this question about AWEsome work, I conducted a meta-analysis to find out the ‘state of the science’. A meta-analysis collects all the studies that address a particular question and then statistically combines their results to find out the answer. It is a way of summarising the current state of research on a topic, providing practitioners with best evidence on a topic and highlighting areas that need further exploration or testing by researchers. In this meta-analysis, I wanted to find out how authenticity was related to those two key outcomes of a ‘good life’: well-being and engagement (Sutton, 2020).
We collected and analysed 75 studies that measured these three key variables of authenticity, well-being, and engagement, involving over 36,000 people. Overall, authenticity was substantially positively related to both well-being and engagement, and this was independent of age, gender, or whether the participants were students, community adults, or employees. This provides us with a solid research base for suggesting that supporting authenticity at work is a key ingredient to enhance employee well-being and engagement.
But what does it mean to be authentic at work? And how can we deal with workplaces that might seem to demand inauthenticity from us? Answering these questions has been the focus of much of my recent research, aiming to help make the dream of AWEsome work a reality for everyone.
What does it mean to be “authentic” at work?
There are two main approaches to understanding authenticity in psychology, which are in turn based on philosophical traditions. These two approaches emphasise either consistency or coherence (Sheldon et al., 1997).
The first approach holds that we are being more authentic when we are more consistent, that is, when our behaviours and personality traits are similar across different situations. For example, if someone is consistently calm and happy with friends and work colleagues, they might seem more authentic than someone who is calm and happy with friends but fairly volatile or angry with work colleagues. So, this view holds that if we behave similarly across our various social and work roles, we are expressing our “true self” more authentically. This consistency approach may make intuitive sense to us, but it relies on making a judgement of what our (or someone else’s) “true self” is. As others have noted, finding this “true self” is remarkably tricky. A consistency approach also assumes that this true self is somehow unchanging, meaning that we can’t be authentic if we change as we adapt to different roles.
The second approach to understanding authenticity suggests that coherence is important: we are being true to ourselves if we have a coherent story of who we are. We may sometimes behave inconsistently or even believe inconsistent things, but if those behaviours and beliefs tie together in a coherent story of who we are, then we feel authentic. For example, our person above might believe that expressing anger with friends and family is not appropriate but that emotional volatility with colleagues is simply an expression of their passion for work. The apparent inconsistencies in behaviour are integrated into a coherent story of who that person is: a calm friend and a passionate worker.
You might be wondering why these definitions of authenticity matter. They matter because they determine how we measure authenticity and, therefore, what conclusions we draw about how to improve well-being. For example, a meta-analysis found that greater personality consistency is positively related to well-being, leading to the conclusion that if we behave less consistently across different roles, it is a sign of poor psychological adjustment (Bleidorn & Ködding, 2013). This obviously stands in stark contrast to the competing view that flexibility and adaptation is a sign of psychological growth and maturity. If authenticity is about being consistent, how can we ever grow without damaging our well-being?
Authenticity, personality consistency, and well-being
In one of my first studies in this area (Sutton, 2018), I wanted to find out whether consistency really was the same as being authentic and which of them was more important to our well-being. I used a “mixed method” approach here, which combines quantitative and qualitative research to gain both breadth and depth of understanding. Much of the research on personality consistency and authenticity uses a method where researchers ask people to complete the same personality questionnaires multiple times for several different social roles. For example, you would be asked to think about yourself in the role of friend and then say how much you agree with the statement “I don’t mind being the centre of attention” on a five point scale from 1 (strongly disagree) through to 5 (strongly agree). After completing the questionnaire for the friend role, you’d be asked to do it again—this time thinking about what you’re like as an employee or with family. The researchers then calculate how similar your answers are across those roles and develop a personality consistency score.
As you can imagine, completing the same questionnaire several times with only a slight change in instructions (e.g. “think of what you’re like as a friend” vs “think of what you’re like as an employee”) has a couple of drawbacks. Besides the obvious fatigue from answering the same questionnaire over and over, people might also try to answer in a way that demonstrates how consistent or flexible they are. We also don’t know how well simply imagining the role actually helps people to report accurately about what they are like in that role. So, I conducted a study where participants were asked to complete a personality questionnaire while they were at work and then, two weeks later, while they were at home (or vice versa). This made the social role more immediate and reduced (or even removed) the possibility that participants could remember what they answered in the last questionnaire. Participants also completed questionnaires about how authentic they felt in that role, how stressed they felt, how satisfied they were with that role, and how much they preferred that role.
Data patterns from Sutton (2018), showing that—in both home and work roles—when people feel more authentic they have lower stress, higher well-being, and stronger liking for that role.
From this information, we calculated how consistent people were across the two roles, as well as their authenticity, stress, and well-being scores. The results directly contradicted the idea that personality consistency is essential to well-being. First, people’s consistency across the two roles was unrelated to how authentic they felt. Second, their authenticity levels were strongly related to their well-being, while their personality consistency was not.
I followed up this questionnaire portion with a series of reflective open-ended questions to explore some of the participants’ perspectives and experiences in greater depth. Some people felt it was important to be consistent in different situations while others appreciated being able to express different parts of themselves in different roles. In all cases, though, the participants explained themselves in terms of a story of being true to themselves, or authentic.
“I see [work] as an aspect of who I am, not everything I am or something that defines me”
“It is important to be myself as much as possible, situation permitting, whilst retaining the standards of professionalism required”.
Importantly, people said that being authentic was about more than just behaviours:
“To ‘be yourself’ at work [. . .] can be expressed in the way you behave, but it is desirable that your values at work correspond to your own personal values”.
Overall, this study shows us that being authentic is not dependent on being consistent or displaying unchanging characteristics of our “true selves”. Instead, as various streams of psychological theory and research concur, being authentic is a process of becoming more aware of ourselves and acting in line with our inner values and states (Rogers, 1961), making self-determined choices that will help us achieve life goals we believe in (Deci & Ryan, 1980). Authenticity is a dynamic process, involving personal development and change (Knoll et al., 2015) and this study shows us that personality change will not damage our well-being.
Recently, I conducted a meta-analysis that tested this finding across a series of studies (Sutton, 2023). I wanted to know what the research literature said overall: does changing our personality affect our well-being and authenticity? I considered both personality traits and personal values (that is, the guiding principles people believe are important in life, such as benevolence or self-direction). The results, based on 24,000 participants, confirmed that changing our personality, whether over time as a process of maturation or across situations as a way of adapting, is positively related to well-being and authenticity. That is, rather than personality flexibility and development being detrimental, we experience it as reflecting our authentic selves and it improves our well-being.
The problem of inauthenticity
This brings us to a major challenge in the research around authenticity at work: if authenticity improves our well-being and engagement, and personality change is not bad for us, why do we sometimes choose to be inauthentic?
Inauthenticity appears to be a particular issue in the workplace. In Friends, for example, Monica doesn’t like “work Chandler” because he’s a suck-up and has a whole different laugh. A cross-cultural study showed that people in England, USA and Russia were less authentic with work colleagues than with friends, parents, or partners (Robinson et al., 2013). This is somewhat disturbing given the amount of time we spend at work and the known effects of inauthenticity on reducing our well-being. What might be the reasons for this and is there anything we can do to help people be more authentic at work?
One reason we’re inauthentic at work is that our jobs can demand that we behave in specific, prescribed ways. And the penalties for not doing so can be serious—disapproval by our colleagues, missed promotions, or even job loss (Ariza-Montes et al., 2017). Sometimes, we feel we must be inauthentic in order to project a professional image, avoid conflict, or keep our jobs (Sutton, 2018). The problem is further exacerbated by the hierarchies that are common in workplaces, as we know that people who feel less powerful also feel less able to be authentic (Chen, 2019). Our managers can have a significant effect on how authentic we are able to be at work.
In a recent study in my lab, we explored this issue further by asking employees to tell us how authentic they felt as well as how bold, mean, and disinhibited their managers were (Sutton & Stapleton, 2023). A bold manager demonstrates confidence and takes risks, a mean manager lacks empathy and often exploits people, and a disinhibited manager is hostile to others and has problems with impulse control. Then, six weeks later, we went back to those employees and asked them to tell us how engaged they felt in their work and the extent to which they were experiencing symptoms of burnout. We expected that the negative traits in a manager would make employees feel they could not be authentic and therefore damage their engagement and/or increase burnout, but that more positive traits would encourage employees to be authentic and thereby improve their work outcomes.
We found that employees with meaner and more disinhibited managers did indeed report lower engagement and higher burnout six weeks later. In contrast, those with bolder managers had higher engagement and lower burnout. But most interestingly, we were able to show that the “pathway” of these effects was via authenticity. That is, having a manager who is mean or disinhibited reduces our authenticity at work and this in turn reduces our engagement and increases burnout. Whereas a bold manager can help us feel more authentic and thereby more engaged and less burned out.
Two important points emerge from this study. First, that authenticity is a potentially valuable personal resource that we might draw on in order to cope with workplace challenges like a difficult boss. Maybe being authentic could even be the key to becoming a superhero: it was finally being true to himself that helped Mr Incredible to deal with his difficult boss! The second point to remember is that being inauthentic at work may well be a protective mechanism, despite its longer-term negative consequences for our well-being.
Protecting and building authenticity at work
So far, we’ve seen that authenticity is incredibly beneficial at work: it boosts well-being and engagement and many other work outcomes besides. So is there anything we can do to help build organisations that value and support employee authenticity? My lab has been working on this question from a number of angles and we can make some recommendations.
First, we need to recognise that not all work situations are going to allow for authenticity and that sometimes inauthenticity is a strategic choice. In these cases, it can be useful to know that mindfulness can help to reduce the negative effect of inauthenticity on well-being (Roemer et al., 2021).
Second, if we are to be authentic at work, we need to be able to trust our co-workers and managers (Sutton, 2018). Rather than constraining workers into inauthentic behaviour, managers can work to build trust in their teams, developing a virtuous circle of trust and authenticity.
Third, in my lab we are aiming to find simple interventions that, over time, might be able to help people develop an “authenticity habit” in much the same way as gratitude journaling, for example, can help to build well-being. One of the activities that shows promise so far is the simple act of recalling a memory of a time when you felt authentic at work. Taking just a couple of minutes to write this memory down leads to a significant increase in authenticity (Sutton et al., 2023).
Finally, many of the broader recommendations in the research literature for improving authenticity at work can be summarised in terms of developing an organisational culture that works to include and value people in all their diversity. Here, we are not simply talking about physical diversity but diversity of approach, values, and personality (Sutton, 2020). Many companies would rather employees conform and adopt standardised ways of working, but people with greater autonomy at work report higher authenticity (van den Bosch & Taris, 2014). There’s more than one way to do the job well and it’s time that employers allow their workers to find better ways of working. For example, employees could be given more autonomy in how they interact with customers, encouraging an authentic connection with the customer that will then benefit the employee, customer, and the company overall.
Conclusion
We’ve seen, from several different angles, that authenticity is a valuable resource at work. When we are authentic, we have higher well-being, more engagement in our jobs and we are able to make a more positive contribution to our organisation. AWEsome work is an essential component of a high performing workplace and can make those 90,000 hours of our lives that we spend at work a fulfilling experience.
Dr. Anna Sutton is a Senior Lecturer in Organisational Psychology at the University of Waikato. Her research addresses questions such as "What kind of things can improve our well-being at work?" and "How different are we in our 'home' and 'work' roles, and how does it affect us?" She supervises several PhD students who are working on projects in these areas, studying ways to use psychology to improve our everyday working lives. Dr. Sutton also teaches undergraduate and postgraduate modules on the application of Psychology to work, and teaches Organisational Behaviour and Human Resource Management as well as Quantitative Research Methods training seminars.