OB
DEI
Jacob Brown
U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, United States
Erica Bailey
Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley, United States
Belinda Zakrzewska
U. of Sussex Business School, United Kingdom
Julianna Pillemer
New York U., United States
Brianna Caza
U. of North Carolina, Greensboro, United States
As described in decades of authenticity research, there are numerous psychological and social benefits to authenticity in and outside of the workplace. For example, authenticity is a robust predictor of subjective well-being (Sutton, 2020) and higher quality relationships (Brunell et al., 2010; Le & Impett, 2013). In addition, experiencing authenticity at work can increase engagement with work tasks (Bailey et al., 2023; Cable et al., 2013), less depleted (Reis et al., 2016), and even increase work performance (Van den Bosch & Taris, 2014). For those in leadership positions, authenticity reaps significant benefits in terms of increasing support (Steffens et al., 2021) and commitment by followers (Leroy et al., 2012). Indeed, “authenticity” was Merriam-Webster’s word of the year in 2023, suggesting a strong societal hunger for understanding the topic and its application in personal and professional life. Given these seemingly numerous benefits to authenticity, less is known about how individuals can access or increase authenticity (Beer & Brandler 2021) and the identity-based constraints surrounding who can be authentic (Martinez et al., 2017). Even more crucially for workers, the nature of authenticity in constrained roles, demanding organizations, or challenging identities remains elusive. Given this, the goal of this symposium is to bring together a set of researchers seeking to understand authenticity in context, specifically situating authenticity in specific roles, identities, and situations. By positioning authenticity in terms of social demands, our findings provide concrete prescriptions on the antecedents of this important construct. We have curated a broad collection of studies which consider the concept of authenticity at various levels of analysis and using various methods, and which address the key points of identity and organizational constraints in distinctive yet complementary ways. We believe that this symposium will offer a productive opportunity to consider how the pursuit and achievement of authenticity in the workplace is enabled and undermined, pursuant to important scholarly and practical innovations in the study of authenticity at work.
Author: Belinda Zakrzewska – U. of Sussex Business School
Author: Erica Bailey – Haas School of Business, UC Berkeley
Author: Julianna Pillemer – New York U.
Author: Jacob Brown – U. of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
Author: Lyndon Earl Garrett – Boston College