Leadership and Imposter Syndrome: A Challenge to Performance in Organisations

This short article explores imposter syndrome and leadership. Throughout the research literature on leadership, there is little mention of imposter syndrome. Imposter syndrome describes the secret belief that one is undeserving of their achievements and anxiety about intellectual or professional inferiority compared with others. As such, it has the clear potential to be obstructive to ambitions for and development of leadership for those who experience it. This paper reflects on why, despite this obvious effect on leadership potential, it has received virtually no attention in the leadership literature. By referring to observations amongst men in a male-dominated industry, it also queries whether the regular attribution of imposter syndrome to women and other marginalised people is obscuring understanding of it as emanating from the cultural and structural environments in most organisations rather than from the inner psychology of individuals.