These Are My (Micro)Confessions: An Episodic Theory of Employee Microconfessions

The trend of moralizing work presents a paradox for contemporary workers. Employees equate their failures to live up to “good employee” ideals (e.g., always available, highly motivated, passionate) with moral failings. Yet, consistently meeting these ideals is unattainable for most employees. This manuscript introduces and develops the phenomenon of microconfessions—informal, low-magnitude confessions—as an overlooked tactic that employees use to alleviate the ongoing moral dilemma of falling short on moralized work ideals. Integrating self-disclosure and work moralization scholarship with insights from fields that have explicitly studied confession, I build a theory of employee microconfessions. I suggest that microconfessions provide the sharer with a sense of relief and a restored sense of morality, which in turn, have downstream consequences. I also pinpoint guilt—an emotion particularly relevant to the moralization of work—as key to activating and strengthening the effects of microconfessions. Finally, I illuminate how the information shared and the setting in which it is shared jointly influence the effects that I outline. My work establishes microconfessions as a unique form of workplace self-disclosure and pivots existing theories to consider functions of disclosure historically overlooked in organizational scholarship. It also contributes new understanding to how employees may experience and offset the moralization of work as well as when it is most advantageous for them to do so.