When an employee is insincere, when they present themselves as other than who they are, what impact does it have on the workplace?

I expect that none of us is entirely transparent about who we are in the workplace or anywhere, but there’s a huge gulf between being 100 percent yourself and being a nearly 100 percent phony.

When it becomes apparent that a manager’s true self—including the actions they take toward others—is at odds with their carefully crafted image, a loss of morale can take place, along with a feeling of anger and betrayal.

When Goodness Is Suspiciously Performative

Do you have people in your social media feeds who feel compelled to post photos and videos of themselves doing good deeds?

I knew someone who posted photos of herself giving blood. She gave blood as often as she was allowed, so every couple of months, there would be a photo of herself giving blood or enjoying the treats they gave her afterward to recover.

She would post photos of candles in front of graves for holidays such as Memorial Day and would note when you asked her if she wanted to buy Girl Scout cookies from your niece that she had already bought a surplus of boxes and donated them to a nearby home for veterans.

The problem? This carefully crafted persona did not align with the person those she perceived as competitors encountered in the workplace. Adjectives used to describe her included smug and supercilious. Rather than goodness, an air of superiority was communicated to anyone other than the entry-level employees working under her.

The same communication skills she used to train and mold her entry-level employees and show herself off to good effect to higher-ups were not carried over to her communications with those co-equal to her. She would deliberately withhold or misrepresent information to give herself an advantage over anyone she sought to compete with, taking an “it’s her or me” attitude toward a peer, all the while touting her good deeds with self-righteous zeal.