Be yourself or adapt yourself? Authenticity, self-monitoring, behavioural integrity, and trust

Abstract

Prior work has offered good arguments to trust both authentic and self-monitoring individuals, yet these two constructs have been described as incompatible and even opposite. This tension raises the question of which strategy will best build trust: Be yourself or adapt yourself? Informed by theory on private and public selves at work, this paper argues that both self-monitoring and authenticity behaviours foster trust, but only when not accompanied by the other behaviour. While actors can combine authenticity and self-monitoring in their self-concept, observers see this combination as lacking behavioural integrity (i.e. word-deed misalignment), thus reducing trust. We test these relationships in a time-lagged, multi-source survey study with project teams. Our results support the hypothesis and demonstrate that behavioural integrity mediates the interaction between authenticity and self-monitoring on perceptions of trust. We discuss the implications of our findings for the development and implementation of effective trust-building strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Authenticity
• self-monitoring
• behavioural integrity
• and trust

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 In contrast to more moral or ethical interpretations of integrity that look at alignment of behaviour with an objective moral standard (Mayer et al., 1995), behavioural integrity was argued to look more at wholeness of self, regardless of value content (Simons, 2002).

2 To further reduce potential common method bias (Podsakoff et al., 2012), we employed a split-sample approach where we randomly used half of the raters to compute the average behavioural integrity score and the other half of the raters for trust.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Brenda Nguyen

Brenda Nguyen is an Assistant Professor at Dhillon School of Business, University of Lethbridge. She obtained her PhD in organizational behaviour at the University of Calgary. Her research interests are in personality, leadership, and character.

Hannes Leroy

Hannes Leroy is an Associate Professor at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam. He obtained his PhD in applied economics and organizational leadership from the University of Leuven. He has a special interest and expertise in authentic and inclusive leadership and how to develop it.

Carol Gill

Carol Gill is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at Melbourne Business School, The University of Melbourne. Her current research and teaching interests are in leadership, with a specific emphasis on integrity.

Tony Simons

Tony Simons is the Louis B. Schaeneman Jr. Professor of Innovation & Dynamic Management, at the Cornell School of Hotel Administration, Cornell University. His research examines trust and credibility as relational, individual and collective qualities. Simons' research focuses on how well people are seen as keeping their word–delivering on their promises and living espoused values.