Organizational Cynicism

What is the nature of the extremely negative attitudes expressed by so many employees toward their organizations?To respond to this question, we introduce the concept of organizational cynicism.We review the literature from several disciplines on this concept and suggest that organizational cynicism is an attitude composed of beliefs, affect, and behavioral tendencies toward an organization.Following our review and conceptualization, we derive implications of this concept and propose a research agenda for organizational cynicism.Cynicism is everywhere-widespread among organization members in the United States (Kanter & Mirvis, 1989), Europe, and Asia (Kouzes &Posner, 1993).Organizational change and quality improvement efforts particularly seem to engender cynicism (Shapiro, 1996).For example, Cunniff notes that employees are increasingly cynical about the "constant parade of initiatives that come with the usual promise of imminent improvement" (1993: 4).Employees in one company circulated clandestine copies of their firm's "adaptation" of the Deming Principles, which included "Humor all employees in phony efforts to include them in process improvement methodologies .... Provide slogans, meaningless exhortations [and] numerical goals.... Drive in fear by discouraging communication and by instituting a policy of Continuous Layoff."These observations are echoed in our own experience by the reaction of part-time MBA students to the topic of "teamwork" (cross-functional collaboration) in organizations.These students could see the benefits of teamwork in theory but perceived it, in practice, as merely a slogan used by their organizations to appear progressive, without changing anything about how work actually gets done (cf., Aktouf, 1992).A young woman in this class was so appalled by her organization that she thought she must be part of "some huge experiment on unmotivating employees."Another young man had been invited to lunch with his coworkers by the management of his organization; he accepted the invitation but worried that management had only made the offer "to keep us off guard."Even the popularity of the comic strip "Dilbert," about an engineer whose organization plumbs the depths of unscrupulousness, suggests that many people perceive their organizations in these terms.In fact, much of the material for the strip actually is sent to the cartoonist via e-mail by frustrated employees (Greilsamer, 1995).This article is about organization members' cynicism toward their organizations-an attitude that appears to be both widespread and ignored by organizational research.We address one major question: how should organizational cynicism be conceptualized?We organize this article as follows.First, we discuss the origin of the concept of cynicism and briefly review