Bad Workplace Experiences Breed Cynicism in Employees

Most cynics doubt workplace conditions will ever improve, and they blame the problems on management.

But it’s not all the workers’ fault. Sometimes cynicism is indeed learned on the job.

Employees grow cynical when companies fail at planned changes or neglect to trumpet their successes when they do change, a noted human resources authority has found.

And if companies repeatedly fail at new initiatives, their workers may become so cynical that any future attempts at change are doomed.

“Cynical workers are usually made, not born,” said management authority John Wanous of Ohio State University in Columbus, Ohio. Wanous is co-author of a study of 757 workers at a Midwestern manufacturing plant.

“Cynicism about organizational change is something employees learn through bad experience and is not a personality trait,” Wanous said.

Managers make a mistake by dismissing cynicism as bad-mouthing by a few “bad apples,” he said.

To avoid the poison of workplace cynicism, employers need to be “honest and open” about their successes and their failures, said Arnon Reichers, a professor of human resources and co-author of the Ohio State study.

“Ignorance breeds cynicism in employees,” Wanous noted.

Layoffs leave “a trail of ill will” that breeds cynicism as well, he said.

Another ingredient of cynicism is job insecurity, experts say. A study for Robert Half International, a staffing services company in Menlo Park, Calif., found 41% of 150 executives at the nation’s 1,000 largest companies said job insecurity was “the No. 1 source of stress in the workplace today.”

Understaffing placed second, at 32%, the study said.

“Staffing cuts have been so deep in recent years that even those employees who have kept their jobs remain uneasy,” said Max Messmer, RHI chairman and chief executive.

Wanous warned that cynicism “can be so poisonous to morale that it colors (employees’) beliefs about all aspects of the company.”

For example, he said, cynical employees paid on a piece-work basis are more likely to feel they are paid unfairly because they “seem to view nearly everything about a company in a bad light,” Wanous said.

Hourly workers, the study found, were more likely to be cynical than salaried workers. But a cynical attitude is more harmful to the job satisfaction and commitment of the salaried workers, he said.

Salaried workers may feel more personal investment in their jobs and thus experience more personal anguish from cynicism, he said.