‘Don’t be yourself’ in the workplace, actually, Columbia professor says. Here’s why authenticity is ‘overrated’
A Columbia professor argues that being authentic in the workplace may not be beneficial for leaders. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic suggests that prioritizing personal values over team needs can hinder leadership effectiveness. Instead, adapting to different workplace scenarios is more likely to lead to success.
- ▪Chamorro-Premuzic's book argues that authenticity can impede a leader's ability to advocate for their team.
- ▪Research indicates that managing one's impression of themselves to others is linked to greater leadership effectiveness.
- ▪The debate around workplace authenticity has gained traction, especially among the emerging Gen Z workforce.
Fortune files mainly under business. We currently carry 642 of its stories.
Story provenance
Source · retrieval · rights · ranking — open for full record
inspect →
Attribution is not the same as permission. This drawer separates discovery metadata, excerpts, WeSearch-generated summaries, reuse status, and whether the publisher receives the visit. Nothing here claims a legal grant the publisher has not made.
Record
| Original publisher | Fortune |
| Canonical URL | https://fortune.com/article/should-i-be-my-authentic-self-at-work-columbia-professor-authenticity-overrated/ |
| Publication time | Sat, 30 May 2026 15:48:41 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-30T16:09:38.763Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-30T16:09:38.763Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | h5uQer_ztVL5 |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
“Just be yourself” may be an oft-given piece of advice, but it won’t take you in the right direction as a workplace leader, one psychology of business professor argues.Recommended Video While authenticity has been linked with increased self-esteem, it can also hamper a leader’s ability know when to stop advocating for one’s personal values and start advocating for their team, Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, a professor of business psychology at University College London and Columbia University adjunct professor, says in his book Don’t Be Yourself: Why Authenticity Is Overrated (and What to Do Instead). “Feeling authentic does not equate to being perceived as talented or competent by others,” Chamorro-Premuzic writes in his book, an excerpt of which was adapted for Harvard Business Review online.
…
Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Fortune.
Discussion
0 commentsMore from Fortune
