Credit: Rob Dobi
Many a rising leader faces the scourge of impostor syndrome: a nagging sensation of not being smart enough that plagues even the most influential of employees.
Luminaries as diverse as Howard Schultz, Sheryl Sandberg, and Maya Angelou have admitted to sometimes feeling that others have overestimated their abilities. Decades before these thoughts had a name, Albert Einstein wrote to a friend, “The exaggerated esteem in which my lifework is held makes me very ill at ease. I feel compelled to think of myself as an involuntary swindler.”
But here’s some good news: Impostor syndrome — or, as it’s more accurately known, the impostor phenomenon — isn’t all bad.
“It’s time to rethink some of our old ideas about impostorism,” said MIT Sloan professor who uses the term “impostor thoughts at work” in her research to more appropriately capture the phenomenon. “We often make a lot of assumptions, but maybe these assumptions are holding us back rather than pushing us forward.”
Tewfik, with Georgetown University’s Jeremy A. Yip and the University of Virginia’s Sean R. Martin, undertook a sweeping survey of impostor phenomenon research to clarify its definition and implications. In the process, they untangled pop culture beliefs from organizational scholarship.
Their paper, “Workplace Impostor Thoughts, Impostor Feelings, and Impostorism: An Integrative, Multidisciplinary Review of Research on the Impostor Phenomenon,” is forthcoming in the Academy of Management Annals.
The trio examined organizational research on the impostor phenomenon and relevant work from adjacent disciplines, reviewing 316 peer-reviewed articles and books to propose a clearer way of thinking about the impostor phenomenon and identify opportunities for future exploration.
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Definition spread
The term “impostor phenomenon” was first coined in 1978 by American psychologists Pauline Clance and Suzanne Imes. In their review of the academic literature, Tewfik and colleagues found that the central defining feature of the impostor phenomenon is the cognitive belief that others overestimate one’s competence.
However, the term has evolved to encompass a broad range of beliefs and feelings related to inadequacy, obscuring its specific meaning, Tewfik said. But it’s impossible to study its effects without a clear definition.
“Part of why I’m interested in this phenomenon is because a lot of people have attached a lot of different definitions to it,” Tewfik said. “You’ll see people talking about a fear of being found out. You’ll see people talking about not belonging. You’ll see some people saying, ‘I think I’m not smart enough.’ Those are closely related, but they’re actually capturing other distinct academic terms in the literature.”
4 myths, debunked
In studying the published research on the subject, Tewfik and colleagues found that people hold four incorrect assumptions about the impostor phenomenon, with implications for workplace success.
Myth 1: The impostor phenomenon is permanent. In the popular press, the impostor phenomenon is often portrayed as a trait — something unchanging and inherent: Either you’re stuck with it or you’re immune. Tewfik’s team found the phenomenon to be more fluid.
“It’s actually a lot more dynamic. In my research, I use the term ‘workplace impostor thoughts’: One can experience these thoughts sometimes but not others,” she said. “It’s not something you’re stuck with, and I think that it’s really important to move the needle in terms of how we talk about this.”
Myth 2: The impostor phenomenon is more prevalent among women or those with marginalized identities. “In the popular press, and in academic literature, the focus is on talking about only women who experience this, or only people who are Black or Asian American,” Tewfik said, likely because the first studies of the phenomenon focused on professional women.
However, Tewfik and her co-authors found that, across studies, the impostor phenomenon affects women and men at similar rates. How people with marginalized identities experience the impostor phenomenon also isn’t definitive.
“This phenomenon is not just a diversity, equity, and inclusion issue. This is something that people across the board can experience,” Tewfik said. “As such, the onus isn’t just on the individual to manage this experience. This is a collective effort where we all need to work together, because it’s not just affecting one person in the workplace.”
Myth 3: The impostor phenomenon is uniformly harmful. Although there are plenty of articles about overcoming the impostor phenomenon, in reality, it’s not all bad.
Indeed, some literature does connect it with negative outcomes: People experiencing the impostor phenomenon can exhibit decreased job satisfaction, decreased motivation, or potentially higher levels of depression.
But those experiences might not be directly caused by the impostor phenomenon, Tewfik said. “If I’m reporting negatively on one thing and you ask me about something else right after, there’s going to be some spillover, and I’ll report negatively on those other outcomes,” she said, describing the dynamic known as the halo effect.
Essentially, someone at work might feel unmotivated and also feel like an impostor, but they might not feel unmotivated because they’re an impostor.
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In fact, the researchers found that people who experience the impostor phenomenon might even perform better at work, at least when it comes to interpersonal tasks, because they try to compensate for their self-perceived incompetence.
“They adapt an ‘other-focused’ orientation. They’re worried that others think they’re not as smart as they should be, so they divert to being increasingly other-oriented, which ends up translating into positive interpersonal outcomes,” Tewfik said.
Myth 4: Impostor syndrome creates negative outcomes through harmful patterns of behavior. There’s a research inclination toward exploring the impostor phenomenon’s negative consequences, especially with regard to stress, ego threat, efficacy, and shame or fear. But it’s not clear that the impostor phenomenon always causes bad outcomes.
There’s a presumption that the “impostor phenomenon makes you feel bad about yourself or consumes your personal resources, so that’s why you end up doing badly. Or it makes you feel shameful, and that’s why something comes out badly,” Tewfik said.
However, she noted, “we don’t have a lot of good research to suggest that these arguments actually hold up when we collect data.” This is an open question — one that Tewfik said she hopes researchers will use their resources to examine.
At this point, there isn’t necessarily a causal relationship between the impostor phenomenon and negative consequences; it’s an area ripe for future investigation. “We need to actually get some really good data behind this,” Tewfik said.
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