New research from the University of Birmingham, Bournemouth University, and the University of Worcester has highlighted how most people will know someone who talks a big game at work, but when it comes down to it, isn’t as competent as they pretend to be. “Organizational charlatans,” otherwise known as ‘false performers,’ are a specific type of incompetent employee who deliberately present themselves as being better able to perform in a job role than they know themselves to be capable of.

Whilst the preceding literature on impression management describes impression management techniques and their effects on the target audience (e.g. strategically acting as a model employee in front of management), the false performance literature places more emphasis on how false impressions can be used to disguise incompetent job performance in the workplace.

How to Recognize False Performance

According to the new research, false performers engage in a number of deceptive behaviors to impress their superiors, coworkers and/or other significant stakeholders. Such behaviors can become apparent from the recruitment stage. For example, false performing interview candidates may lie about their work history or references.

Once employed, false performers may be recognized by their tendency to minimize errors and maximize achievements. They often shift the blame for work mistakes to coworkers or, conversely, claim credit for work done by other individuals or the team. In performance appraisals especially, managers should be alert for employees who over-talk, use persuasive language or over-emphasize past achievements to divert attention from their current incompetent job performance.

Self-Presentation Training

Whilst impression managers may be competent performers, false performers are incompetent and skillful only in promoting the false impression that they perform well. Therefore, self-presentation training should focus on helping managers and employees to understand what impression management is acceptable in the workplace versus what is not, including false performance.

For example, such training would describe how competent impression managers may legitimately:

• Seek to make a good impression in a job interview by talking about their strengths.
• Describe their individual contribution/s to their team’s successes.
• Use the performance appraisal as an opportunity to highlight their positive attributes and accomplishments.
• Present themselves as friendly and polite to their manager and co-workers to facilitate work friendships and networking.

In direct contrast, and qualifying as unacceptable workplace behavior, a false performer might:

• Lie or fabricate their CV, qualifications, work history, or abilities in a job interview.
• Claim credit for team successes which they had very little or no input to.
• Use the performance appraisal as an opportunity to misrepresent their job performance by reporting a higher level of competence than they know themselves to possess.
• Deliberately present themselves as friendly to distract others from their incompetence and/or to obtain favorable evaluations.

Management Training in Self-Awareness

Critically, management training should encourage managers to reflect on their own impression management behaviors. As managers are often the ones tasked with recognizing and managing false performance amongst employees, it makes sense that they become more self-aware of their own self-presentation behaviors and how these might be perceived by their subordinates. For example, during training, managers could be asked to consider:

• How closely does the professional image I seek to create align to my actual job performance?
• Do my subordinates respect and trust my leadership?
• Do I set a good example to my staff in terms of my own job performance and self-presentation behaviors?

In short, competent managers are better role models for their staff. However, certain managers may themselves be false performers and, in such a scenario, staff may start to mimic their manager’s false performance behaviors. According to the latest research paper, a false performing manager or coworker can have a demoralizing effect on the entire team, and even lead to a contagion effect whereby some employees may decide to engage in false performance to receive similar rewards (e.g., positive evaluations or promotion). This paper urges learning and development (L&D) professionals to actively address the problem of false performance through tailored training and policies to ensure that this negative behavior does not spread amongst the workforce.

One research participant says, “I think the focus really should be on training managers to manage the scenario. The only reason these people exist in organizations is because managers don’t manage them, and usually it becomes a problem.”

In other words, there is a risk that if management ignore false performance and are not trained to recognize and manage it, this could promote a culture which can allow false performance to thrive.

False Performance Management Training

A transparent training approach to detecting and defending against false performance from the selection stage is critical to prevent organizational charlatans from entering the organization. L&D professionals should offer training which helps management, human resource (HR) professionals and interviewers recognize the various false performance behaviors which may appear in the job interview and performance appraisal. It will usually be easier for managers to detect false performance in a performance appraisal as they can focus on current key performance indicators (KPIs) and rely less on the false performer’s subjective narrative.

There is also some suggestion that coworkers may be better positioned to observe and recognize false performance. As such, the latest research recommends conducting 360-degree appraisal to capture multiple stakeholder and co-worker feedback, providing a more realistic insight into job performance and, crucially, supporting the detection and management of false performance.

Ultimately, trained managers and interviewers are more likely to detect false performance and, therefore, less likely to be duped into appointing a false performing candidate. This is hugely advantageous for an employer as recent false performance research indicates that, once a false performer has entered an organization, it can be very difficult to dismiss them by law (Employment Rights Act 1996) without extensive evidence of wrongdoing (e.g., gross misconduct). To conclude, it is imperative that L&D professionals tackle the problem of false performance throughout the work life cycle to mitigate the complications caused by the employment of an organizational charlatan.