1. Introduction

Organisations invest heavily in developing corporate culture, translating executive visions of desired values and behaviours into practical policies, procedures, and practices distributed throughout the organisational hierarchy. This encompasses the operating model at every level and defines acceptable conduct across domains, including ethics, performance, client interaction, and responses to conflict or trauma.

Central to this effort is identifying the appropriate balance of hard skills — technical, task-specific competencies increasingly amenable to automation — and soft skills: the interpersonal, prosocial, and emotional capabilities that remain distinctively human. These include people skills, social skills, communication skills, character and personality traits, social intelligence, and emotional intelligence. One of the defining strategic challenges for CEOs, CHROs, and HR functions over the coming decade is understanding how to identify, develop, and leverage soft skills as intelligent machines absorb a growing proportion of hard-skill tasks — a trend accelerated by the growth of knowledge work and some people’s active preference for human interaction even as automation spreads [1,2]. Soft skills are subtle, highly nuanced, and dynamic, and they represent a core feature of both organisational culture and people strategy.

However, the natural diversity of any workforce means the great majority of employees must ‘adopt’ organisationally prescribed behaviours through mimicry or suppression of their authentic responses — what organisational psychologists call shallow acting [6,46]. This creates emotional dissonance, which research consistently links to de-motivation, productivity loss, disengagement, psychological distress, burnout, sickness absence, unethical behaviour, and employee turnover [1,2,6–8,11,13–16]. The costs are substantial, yet frequently invisible to those who set policy.

2. The Scale of the Problem

The organisational-level data present a sobering picture. Four interconnected trends illustrate the systemic nature of the challenge.

2.1 Employee Engagement

Employee engagement in the UK and US stands at approximately 15% [3,4]. The State of the Global Workplace survey by Gallup found that 85% of employees are either not engaged or actively disengaged, representing an estimated $7 trillion in lost productivity globally. Within that 85%, 18% are actively disengaged, and 67% are simply ‘not engaged’ — present but performing below their potential. Critically, one in five of those classified as highly engaged report burnout [3]. This raises a fundamental question: if engagement is so low, what is destroying the intrinsic motivation that most employees bring to a new role [2,3,5]?

2.2 Employee Retention and Turnover Costs

Taking the US as an example, companies spend approximately $20 billion per year on hiring, with 95% of recruitment activity filling vacancies created by voluntary turnover [7]. In outsourced contact centres — an industry that employs up to 10 million people worldwide, approximately 80% of whom are frontline staff — annual attrition rates of 50% to 200% have become normalised. The associated value-stream inefficiency and EBIT loss are significant. Turnover replacement costs typically range from 50% to 200% of annual salary, depending on role level and industry [1,31,35,36]. The financial impact of emotional dissonance driving this attrition is eye-watering — yet it remains largely unaddressed as a structural issue.

2.3 Work-Related Stress and Mental Health

The record for mental ill-health in the workplace is stark. In the UK, 1 in 6 workers experience depression, anxiety, or stress-related problems at any one time. In 2016/17 alone, stress accounted for 40% of all work-related ill-health, with 49% of all lost working days attributable to stress, depression, or anxiety — approximately 72 million working days at an annual cost to business of between £35 billion and £100 billion [12,15,16]. Presenteeism — attending work while impaired — generates twice the productivity loss of sickness absence. Around 90% of employees who take stress-related absence cite a different reason, a behaviour that may reflect the fact that 15% of those who did disclose stress were subsequently disciplined, dismissed, or demoted [12]. This represents a systemic suppression of authentic stress responses, compounding the original problem.

2.4 Organisational Trust

Trust in organisations and public institutions is declining. The Edelman Trust Barometer consistently reports distrust in business at approximately 50%, while Gallup’s ‘Confidence in Institutions’ data suggests that only 25% of people hold any meaningful degree of confidence in business — a finding reinforced by Gallup at Work research [17–22]. Given the extensive evidence base linking trust to team performance, knowledge sharing, and organisational outcomes [17–22], this is a material strategic risk — particularly as organisations call on employees to demonstrate more authenticity and empathy, while simultaneously operating in ways that erode trust.

3. The Authenticity Paradox

3.1 Defining Authenticity

Authenticity, at its most fundamental, refers to the degree to which an individual’s actions are congruent with their attitudes, beliefs, and desires, despite external pressures [23,24,27]. A perceived lack of authenticity is considered a form of bad faith — a failure to act in accordance with one’s true self. Authenticity is not simply a performance variable; it is central to mental health and wellbeing [2,14,33,39–41], moral behaviour [25,26], prosocial conduct [25], and trust-building [14,42–44].

As a psychological construct, authenticity is effectively binary: one is either acting in accordance with one’s true self or one is not. This dichotomy creates an immediate and underappreciated dilemma for organisational culture. When organisational processes require employees to act contrary to their authentic dispositions, the result is not neutral — it generates dissonance, with well-documented negative consequences for both the individual and the organisation [1,2,6–8,11,13–16,25,26,28–38].

3.2 The Problem with “Be More Authentic”

Despite a large body of studies on Authentic Leadership and the Authentic Self, the notion that anyone should be more authentic is conceptually flawed. If an individual is already behaving in accordance with their authentic self, asking them to be more authentic is incoherent. Conversely, asking them to adopt someone else’s version of authenticity — an organisationally prescribed identity — is, by definition, asking them to be inauthentic [24–27]. Research confirms that most people believe they are already behaving authentically, even when external observers would disagree [52,53].

The real problem is not individual inauthenticity but organisational conditions that systematically prevent authentic behaviour. When culture, policy, and practice constrain autonomy and self-determination — both prerequisites for authentic functioning — the outcome is structural inauthenticity, regardless of individual intent [47,48]. The solution is therefore environmental, not individual.

3.3 Context and the Working Self

A nuanced finding from psychological research is that authenticity is not entirely context independent. Individuals present different facets of themselves across social roles, and these contextually adapted presentations can still be authentically of the person, if they reflect genuine beliefs and values appropriate to that setting [23]. This means that some degree of role-related behavioural adaptation is compatible with authenticity — but only within bounds. When organisational demands require sustained performance of behaviours fundamentally at odds with an employee’s values and personality, shallow acting replaces genuine adaptation, and dissonance follows [6,34,46].

4. The Empathy Dilemma

4.1 The Psychology of Empathy

Empathy is closely associated with the Big Five personality trait of Agreeableness, specifically its facets of Altruism and Tender-mindedness. Critically, personality traits — including empathy-related dispositions — are activated by situational cues [51,55–59]. Empathetic behaviour will not occur unless environmental conditions make it possible and psychologically safe to express it. Without an appropriate situational trigger, empathic traits remain dormant.

Furthermore, the motivational mechanism underlying empathic behaviour is largely egoistic rather than purely altruistic. Highly agreeable individuals experience genuine personal distress when witnessing others’ suffering, and prosocial helping behaviour functions primarily as a means of alleviating that personal distress [28,46,50]. Performance-driven cultures that chronically overload employees effectively suppress empathy — not through a failure of character, but through situational design.

4.2 The Limits of Empathy Training

Many organisations have responded to the perceived empathy deficit by investing in empathy training. While the aspiration is understandable, the approach is problematic. Personality traits can shift, but doing so requires sustained environmental change; it is not achieved through brief training interventions [51,56–59]. Organisational leaders tend not to score highly on trait agreeableness [52–55] — partly because selection processes favour assertiveness and competitiveness over altruism. Paradoxically, too much empathy can be detrimental: it risks creating unhealthy co-dependence and undermining goal achievement [28,46]. Finally, asking individuals to perform empathic behaviours that feel inconsistent with their personality states is simply another form of shallow acting — generating the same dissonance it purports to resolve.

4.3 Psychometric Assessment and the Recruitment Problem

Organisations frequently attempt to address empathy and fit through psychometric screening at recruitment. However, using personality assessment as a selection tool is undermined by a well-established finding first reported by Guion and Gottier in 1965: Personality States — the moment-to-moment expressions of personality that any assessment instrument captures — are dynamic and do not reliably reflect underlying Personality Traits, which represent dispositional patterns across time and context [52,53,60]. A self-report personality assessment is a snapshot of a psychological state, not a stable trait inventory, particularly under the evaluative pressure of a job interview context.

Research also consistently shows that high agreeableness is negatively associated with success in many competitive or goal-oriented work contexts, as demonstrated in APA research [52,53]. Selecting for high empathy without accounting for this relationship may introduce performance vulnerabilities rather than resolve interpersonal problems.

5. Person-Environment Fit and Its Limits

The theoretical foundation for most organisational recruitment and development activity is Person-Environment (P-E) Fit [3,5] — the premise that matching individuals to their work environment on relevant attributes produces positive outcomes for both parties. P-E fit is sound in principle but frequently fails in practice for three interconnected reasons.

First, the environmental side of the fit equation is typically underspecified. Organisational culture models reduce complex, dynamic, multi-layered environments to simplified lists of values or competencies, losing the resolution that determines whether individuals can behave authentically in practice [3,5].

Second, the person side of the equation is equally under-specified, for the reasons described above regarding personality states. The individual who presents at the interview is not the individual who arrives on their first day.

Third, even when fit is achieved at recruitment, the organisational environment changes continuously, leading to drift between individual characteristics and environmental demands. Without mechanisms for ongoing monitoring and intervention, initial fit degrades.

5.1 The Gen Z Context

These challenges are compounded by significant demographic shifts. Research by the American Psychological Association covering 2008 to 2017 found that Gen Z adults experienced a 52–71% increase in serious psychological distress relative to Millennials (Gen Y) and prior generations, with a 47% increase in suicidal ideation and related outcomes [12,39,45–48]. This cohort is more psychologically sensitive to inauthenticity, dissonance, and environments that undermine autonomy. People strategies designed for prior generational profiles will need substantive revision to remain effective.

6. Practical Recommendations

There is no shortage of organisational psychology research demonstrating what does work. The following recommendations are grounded in the evidence reviewed above and are designed for senior leaders, HR directors, and organisational development professionals.

Recommendation 1: Treat Intensive Emotional Regulation as High-Risk Activity

Any role that requires employees to intensively regulate their emotions during interactions with customers, clients, or authority figures should be formally classified as a high-risk activity. This classification should trigger structured management review, including assessment of role design, the frequency and duration of emotionally demanding interactions, and the adequacy of existing support mechanisms. Interventions that help employees ‘entrain’ appropriate emotional responses — rather than suppress or fake them — are significantly more effective than those that simply demand performance compliance [6,34,46].

Recommendation 2: Prioritise Deep Acting Over Shallow Acting

Shallow acting — performing behaviours that feel inconsistent with one’s internal state — is the primary driver of emotional dissonance and its negative consequences. Deep acting — genuinely internalising the values and intent behind required behaviours — produces the same organisational outcomes without the associated costs. The difference between the two is determined almost entirely by the quality of employee buy-in. Organisations that invest in genuine engagement with the purpose behind required behaviours, rather than simply enforcing compliance with prescribed behaviours, generate authentic alignment — and all the downstream benefits that entails [6,2,28].

Recommendation 3: Use Psychometrics for Development, Not Selection

Personality assessment is not a valid tool for recruitment decisions, for the reasons already outlined. However, it is a powerful vehicle for self-awareness and interpersonal understanding when used in a developmental context. Personality state-based behaviour is highly responsive to situational cues [51,60]. This means that if undesirable behaviours are observed, the most effective intervention is to change the environment — not the person. Research confirms that when individuals are given situational contexts that support higher-order trait expression, they not only behave accordingly but report greater wellbeing and job satisfaction as a result [40,41,53,61].

Recommendation 4: Design Environments for Empathy, Rather Than Training It

Rather than investing in empathy training — which attempts to modify relatively stable personality dispositions — organisations should focus on reducing the situational factors that suppress empathic behaviour. This includes reviewing performance management frameworks that create zero-sum competition between goal achievement and interpersonal support, workload management practices that deplete cognitive and emotional capacity, and hierarchical structures that punish vulnerability. When environments are designed to activate empathic traits rather than inhibit them, authentic empathic behaviour follows naturally [28,46,50,55].

7. Conclusion

Organisations spend significant resources pursuing people strategies that are, in many cases, systematically undermining the very outcomes they intend to produce. The evidence base is not new — many of the foundational findings reviewed here date back decades — yet the gap between psychological science and organisational practice remains wide.

The central insight is straightforward: organisations are composed entirely of people — as investors, customers, suppliers, and employees — yet people strategy frequently fails to properly assimilate knowledge about the human condition. Authenticity is not a performance attribute that can be mandated; empathy is not a training outcome that can be reliably installed; and fit is not a static property that survives contact with a dynamic, complex workplace environment.

The knowledge required to do better exists. More than a century and a half of accumulated research in psychology and organisational behaviour provides detailed, actionable guidance. What is required is the leadership will to apply it — and the intellectual honesty to measure what is actually being produced by current practice.

As automation continues to absorb hard-skill tasks, the prosocial, relational, and emotional capabilities of human employees become the primary source of competitive differentiation. Organisations that fail to create conditions in which those capabilities can flourish authentically will not simply underperform — they will progressively destroy the very human capital on which their future depends.