When Authenticity at Work Becomes a Performance

As a researcher, I have spent years inside organisations observing how people speak, behave, and manage themselves at work. What has consistently struck me is not the absence of authenticity, but at times, how carefully it is performed.

In many contemporary workplaces, employees are encouraged to “bring their whole selves to work,” to be open, genuine, and values-aligned. On the surface, this appears progressive and human-centred. Yet through ethnographic research, I began to notice a quieter tension: people were not resisting authenticity — they were learning how to act it.

This research emerged from prolonged engagement with an organisation that prided itself on a strong, values-driven culture. Employees appeared engaged, empowered, and emotionally aligned. But beneath this apparent cohesion was a complex process of self-management, emotional regulation, and impression control. What looked like authenticity was often the result of subtle cultural pressures shaping how people believed they should think, feel, and present themselves.

I became interested not in whether employees were being authentic or inauthentic, but in what it costs to sustain authenticity as a performance. How do organisational ideologies shape the self? What happens when emotional alignment becomes an expectation rather than a choice? And how do employees cope when their inner experiences do not match what the culture rewards?

This Thought Leadership Article draws on that research to explore how authenticity is performed in "front stage sites of enactment" and how normative control operates through culture rather than rules, and why even well-intentioned workplaces can unintentionally create psychological strain.

My aim is not to dismiss authenticity at work, but to complicate it — and to invite leaders, Human Resources, and People and Culture professionals to look more carefully at what authenticity means in practice, and who carries the burden of performing it.

My research into organisational culture and normative control reveals how employees across different roles and levels often learn to act authentic, even when their internal thoughts and emotions tell a different story. This performance is not accidental. It is shaped by culture and subtle pressures to belong.

The Front Stage of Organisational Life

Drawing on Erving Goffman’s concept of the front stage, this research examined how employees manage impressions when they are visible to others — in meetings, customer interactions, leadership forums, and everyday workplace rituals

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On the front stage, employees are expected to:

• display enthusiasm

• express alignment with organisational values

• regulate emotion

• communicate in culturally approved ways

These expectations are rarely written down. Instead, they are learned through observation, reward, correction, and subtle cues from leaders and peers. What appears as authenticity therefore can often be a carefully managed performance.

Normative Control: When Culture Shapes the Self

The study shows how normative control operates through organisational culture. Rather than relying on overt rules or surveillance, organisations encourage employees to internalise values and culture so deeply that compliance feels voluntary, moral and self-driven.

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In the case examined, a strong customer-centric ideology was embedded through language, rituals, recognition systems, and leadership behaviour. Employees across all levels — executives, support staff, and frontline workers — consistently reflected the same cultural messages in how they spoke and behaved. This consistency created the appearance of a unified, authentic culture.

But beneath the surface, employees were managing themselves in different ways.

Surface Acting and Deep Acting

Using Hochschild’s concepts, the research identified two distinct forms of acting on the front stage:

• Surface acting: Employees consciously adjust their language or emotions to appear aligned, while knowing internally that they feel differently.

• Deep acting: Employees unconsciously reshape their feelings so that alignment feels real — even when it involves suppressing doubt, discomfort, or moral tension.

  
  

Both forms were present across the organisation. Some employees were highly aware that they were “playing the part.” Others appeared to blur the boundary between their organisational role and their sense of self, genuinely experiencing the organisation’s ideology and culture as part of who they were.

The Three “Authentic” Selves Employees Were Expected to Perform

Across the organisation, three front-stage identities were repeatedly observed:

1. The engaged self – enthusiastic, committed and willing to go above and beyond

2. The empowered self – proactive, flexible, and solution-focused

3. The authentic self – open, genuine and emotionally aligned with organisational values

   
   

Employees were praised, rewarded, and made visible when they successfully enacted these identities. When they did not — particularly when they expressed discomfort, dissent, or emotional strain — consequences often followed. This dynamic made authenticity paradoxical: employees were encouraged to “be themselves,” but only within narrow cultural boundaries.

Who Carries the Greatest Cost?

While front-stage sites of enactment affected all employees, the research showed that frontline workers carried a disproportionate burden.

Frontline employees were:

• more likely to surface act continuously

• exposed to emotionally charged interactions

• subject to rigid performance metrics

• and least protected from the psychological costs of emotional suppression

  
  

These roles were also more likely to be occupied by culturally and linguistically diverse employees and those in lower-paid positions — raising serious questions about equity, power, and psychological risk.

Why This Matters for Leaders

Strong cultures are often celebrated. But this research suggests that unexamined cultural strength can quietly erode employee wellbeing.

When employees must constantly perform authenticity:

• emotional labour intensifies

• self-alienation increases

• dissent becomes risky

• psychological strain is normalised

Leaders may never see this happening — because front-stage sites of enactment are designed to reassure them that everything is fine.

Looking Beyond the Performance

The key insight from this research is simple but uncomfortable:

When everyone looks authentic, it may be because they’ve learned how to act that way

Understanding organisational culture requires looking beyond what employees say and do in formal settings, and paying closer attention to:

• language patterns

• emotional regulation

• what is rewarded

• and what cannot safely be expressed

Ethnographic approaches make these dynamics visible — not to blame organisations, but to help them lead more consciously and humanely.

A Call to Action for Human Resources, People & Culture, and Leaders

If authenticity has become something employees feel they must perform, then culture is doing more work than we realise.

For Human Resources, People and Culture professionals, and senior leaders, this research calls for a deeper reckoning with how authenticity is framed, rewarded, and enforced at work. Values, leadership narratives, engagement practices, and wellbeing initiatives are not neutral — they actively shape how employees believe they should think, feel, and present themselves in order to belong.

The question is not whether your organisation values authenticity.The question is who feels safe enough to be authentic — and at what cost. Normative control appears as enthusiasm, alignment, positivity, and emotional regulation. When authenticity is narrowly defined, employees learn quickly which feelings are welcome and which are risky. Over time, surface acting becomes normalised, deep acting becomes invisible, and self-silencing is mistaken for cultural strength.

The call to action is not to abandon strong cultures or shared values — but to practice them with reflexivity and restraint.

This means:

• Examining how “authenticity” is implicitly defined in your organisation

• Paying attention to what emotions, questions, or identities are quietly discouraged

• Recognising emotional labour as real work, not personal resilience failure

• Creating back-stage spaces where disagreement, ambivalence, and fatigue can be expressed without consequence

Human Resources and People and Culture functions are uniquely positioned to interrupt performative authenticity — not by policing behaviour, but by shifting the cultural conditions that make performance necessary in the first place. This requires moving beyond engagement metrics and values statements toward deeper, relational forms of listening.

For leaders, the responsibility is even closer. Every story you tell, every behaviour you reward, every discomfort you avoid sends a message about what kind of self is acceptable at work. When employees believe they must perform authenticity to remain visible or valued, psychological strain is already present — even if it is well-hidden.

The challenge, then, is not to demand authenticity, but to make room for it. That work is slower, less polished, and sometimes uncomfortable. But it is also the difference between cultures that look authentic — and cultures that actually allow people to be. If organisations are serious about wellbeing, psychological safety, and ethical leadership, they must be willing to look beyond the performance and ask a harder question: What are our people doing to belong here — and what is it costing them?

That is where real cultural responsibility begins.

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Dr Kiaos is a researcher and practitioner working at the intersection of organisational culture, change, public sector reform and mental health. She is the founder of Mind Culture Life Australia, supporting leaders and People and Culture teams to understand how work really gets done during change.

References

Kiaos, T.A. (2025). Organizational Culture and Faking Authenticity: How Employees Act on the Front Stage under Pressures of Normative Control. Organizational Cultures, 25(2), 41. https://doi.org/10.18848/2327-8013/CGP/v25i02/41-63