What is imposter syndrome and how does it show up at work? Causes, tips for managers and coping strategies for employees who feel undeserving of success.
An engineer who has delivered successful projects for years is given a new role and thinks to herself, "One day they will realise I'm not good enough." A sales manager who has just been promoted assumes it was down to luck or being in the right place at the right time. A young specialist who presented the best idea in the meeting spends hours afterwards criticising herself: "I said something silly." The common name for these experiences is imposter syndrome, also known as the impostor phenomenon. It describes people who cannot internalise their achievements, who believe their competence is a "mask" worn for the outside world, and who fear that the mask will one day slip. In this article I look at how this experience appears at work, what causes it, how it affects employees and organisations, and what managers can do.
What Is Imposter Syndrome?
The concept was first described by clinical psychologists based on their observations of women who were academically and professionally successful. In the years since, it has become clear that people of any gender can experience it.
One point needs underlining: imposter syndrome is not a psychiatric diagnosis and does not appear in diagnostic classification systems. It is better understood as a pattern in how a person perceives their own success. That said, this pattern can occur alongside anxiety, depressive symptoms and burnout, and it can make working life seriously difficult.
Its main features are:
- Attributing success to luck, timing, other people's help or "the other side being mistaken"
- Attributing failure entirely to personal inadequacy
- Fear of being "found out", that is, of having one's inadequacy noticed
- Being unable to accept praise and playing down recognition
- Intense anxiety when faced with new responsibilities
How does the imposter cycle work?
This experience often runs as a self-feeding cycle. When a new task arrives, the person feels intense anxiety. To cope with it, they either over-prepare or put the work off until the last moment. When the task is completed successfully, there is brief relief, but the person credits the result to extreme effort or luck rather than to ability. The thought "I got away with it this time, but if I don't work the same way next time I'll be found out" pushes anxiety even higher at the next task. So instead of strengthening self-confidence, every success feeds the fear of being "caught". To break the cycle, you need to see the real reasons behind your success and recalibrate the amount of effort you put in.
Signs of Imposter Syndrome at Work
Employees who experience this often look highly successful and conscientious from the outside, so the problem frequently goes unnoticed. Some signs that managers and employees can watch for:
- Over-preparation: Working for days on even a simple presentation and preparing for every possible scenario.
- Procrastination: Delaying the start of a task with the thought "if I can't do it perfectly, I won't start at all", then working intensely at the last minute.
- Not asking for help: Struggling alone for fear that asking a question will expose inadequacy.
- Turning down opportunities: Declining promotions, new projects or presentation opportunities by saying "I'm not ready yet".
- Overworking: Constantly working after hours and at weekends to prove one's worth.
- Oversensitivity to feedback: Reading a small criticism as "there it is, they've finally worked it out".
- Anxiety instead of relief after success: The pressure of "now I have to pull it off again".
Take an employee who has just been promoted to operations supervisor at a logistics company. In the first few weeks, she experiences each of her manager's questions as an exam, rechecks her reports again and again at home in the evenings, and does everything herself instead of asking her team for help. From the outside she looks extremely hard-working, but a few months later she is dealing with severe fatigue and sleep problems.
A person who experiences this sees their achievements not as evidence, but as a "being found out" that has merely been postponed.
Why Does Imposter Syndrome Happen?
There is no single cause. Personal history, personality traits and the working environment all come together.
Personal and developmental factors
- Conditional love and acceptance: A family environment in which a child was valued only for achievement.
- Perfectionism: Setting standards that are hard to reach and seeing small mistakes as major failures.
- Comparison: Growing up constantly compared with siblings, peers or people regarded as "successful".
- Early maladaptive schemas: In schema therapy, enduring belief patterns that develop in childhood, known as "defectiveness", "failure" and "unrelenting standards", can feed this experience.
Factors related to the working environment
- Moving into a new role: A promotion, a new company, starting as a manager or moving to a different sector.
- Being in the minority: Being the only woman on the team, the youngest, the first person in your family to attend university, or the only one who came from Anatolia to the big city.
- Unclear success criteria: Environments where no one has defined what "good enough" looks like.
- A culture intolerant of mistakes: Teams where errors are punished and nobody can say "I don't know".
- Pressure to be constantly visible: Constant success stories on social media and professional networks can make a person feel even more inadequate.
Social and cultural pressures
In Turkey, many employees are the first generation their families put through education at great sacrifice. For someone who grew up hearing "look at everything we did to put you through school", every success at work can feel like repaying a debt, while failure means not only a personal disappointment but a family one. High-stakes exam processes such as LGS and YKS (Turkey's national high-school and university entrance exams) can also reinforce, from an early age, the belief that worth is measured by a score or a ranking. People who enter working life with this background may experience evaluations within the organisation as exams too.
Given that 66% of employees in Turkey reported experiencing intense stress for much of the previous day (Gallup, 2026; 2025 data), it is reasonable to say that high-pressure and ambiguous work environments can further fuel this kind of anxiety.
Effects on the Employee and the Organisation
In the short term, imposter syndrome can push a person to work harder, but in the long term it carries a serious cost:
- Burnout: The constant effort to prove oneself drains energy. I explain how burnout develops in more detail in my article on burnout syndrome.
- Anxiety and sleep problems: The fear of being "found out" can lead to thought loops that continue into the night.
- Career stagnation: Employees who turn down opportunities fall short of their potential.
- Lost talent for the organisation: Employees who are unaware of their own ability do not take initiative, do not share their ideas and avoid leadership roles.
- Imbalance in how work is shared: Someone who tries to do everything alone both exhausts themselves and holds back the development of the team.
Much of this stays invisible for a long time, because from the outside the person continues to perform at a high level. The problem is often noticed only when the employee resigns unexpectedly, goes on long-term sick leave or turns down an important promotion. For this reason, managers need to pay attention not only to results but also to the price paid to achieve them.
What Can Managers and HR Do?
Although this experience seems personal, the working environment either feeds it or eases it. Steps that organisations and managers can take:
Set clear expectations and success criteria. When "good enough" is defined, it becomes harder for employees to raise their own standards without limit. When assigning a task, state the expected quality, the timeframe and the priority clearly.
Give concrete and balanced feedback. Instead of general praise such as "great job", say specifically what worked: "The way you answered the objections calmly and with data in the client meeting was reassuring." Concrete feedback makes it easier for a person to attribute success to their own skills.
Normalise mistakes. When managers talk about their own mistakes and learning processes, it creates an environment where saying "I don't know" or "I need help" is accepted. Research showing that psychological safety is linked to learning suggests that this approach also contributes to team performance (Edmondson, 1999).
Support transition periods. Offer mentoring and regular one-to-one meetings to newly promoted employees, first-time managers and people moved to a new unit. Say openly that struggling in the first months is natural.
Set up mentoring and peer support groups. Talking with people who share similar experiences eases the feeling of "I'm the only one going through this".
Don't reward overworking. Praising emails sent at midnight or holding up the employee who constantly works overtime as an example strengthens this cycle. Recognise results and sustainable ways of working.
New managers are at particular risk
Employees stepping into management for the first time are among the groups most vulnerable to this experience. Managing the friends you worked alongside yesterday, moving from technical expertise to people management and taking responsibility for the consequences of your decisions on this scale for the first time can easily trigger the feeling "I can't do this job". On top of that, managers can be even more reluctant to share their struggles with their teams. A structured onboarding process for new managers, a mentoring match with an experienced manager and regular support conversations in the first months protect the health of both the individual and the team.
Coping at the Individual Level and the Role of Therapy
Alongside organisational steps, there are methods employees can try on their own:
- Keeping an achievement journal: Regularly writing down completed work, positive feedback received and difficulties overcome.
- Questioning the thought: "Did I achieve this only through luck? What is the evidence for and against that?"
- Adopting the "good enough" principle: Deciding the level of quality each task requires and noticing the extra effort spent going beyond it.
- Sharing: Talking about these feelings with a trusted colleague or mentor.
If this experience has lasted a long time, is leading to anxiety and sleep problems or is clearly affecting career decisions, professional support can be helpful. Cognitive behavioural therapy helps a person notice their automatic thoughts about success and failure, test them against evidence and develop a more balanced appraisal. A meta-analysis of workplace stress management programmes also found that cognitive-behavioural programmes had a larger effect than other approaches (Richardson and Rothstein, 2008). When deep-rooted belief patterns are involved, schema-focused work can also contribute to the process.
How to Get Started in Your Organisation
Needs analysis: Add questions about feedback culture, the approach to mistakes and role clarity to employee surveys. Also listen separately to the experiences of groups in transition, such as newly promoted staff, first-time managers and recent graduates.
Programme: Train managers in concrete feedback, setting expectations and psychological safety. Workshops for employees cover perfectionism, self-criticism and cognitive restructuring skills. Because research shows that the effect of one-off seminars fades over time and that one-to-one coaching and group training are more effective (Vanhove et al., 2016), the programme should be designed with reinforcement sessions and individual support options. You can find the framework for such programmes on the corporate services page.
Measurement: Regularly monitor feedback and psychological safety scores in employee surveys, application rates for promotion and development opportunities, participation in the mentoring programme and burnout indicators.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is imposter syndrome an illness?
No. It is not a disorder listed in diagnostic classification systems, but a pattern of experience about how a person perceives their own success. However, it can occur alongside anxiety, depressive symptoms and burnout, and in that case it is helpful to get an assessment from a mental health professional.
Does it only affect women?
Although the concept was first described through observations of successful women, it can occur in people of any gender. Being in the minority in a group, moving into a new role and having a perfectionist temperament can raise the risk regardless of gender.
How is it different from modesty?
A modest person is aware of their achievements but does not put them forward. A person with imposter syndrome genuinely believes they do not deserve their achievements, and this belief causes intense anxiety. The difference lies not in outward manner but in the distress the person feels inside.
What should I say if, as a manager, I notice this in an employee?
Rather than speaking as if you were making a diagnosis, share your observations: "You did excellent work on the last project, but I noticed you put it down to luck." Remind them of their concrete achievements, clarify expectations and, if they wish, let them know they can use the support options available in the organisation.
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Eda Erkan Alapala
Klinik Psikolog. İstanbul Kent Üniversitesi Klinik Psikoloji Tezli Yüksek Lisans mezunu; bilişsel davranışçı terapi, çocuk merkezli oyun terapisi ve çocuk-ergen psikoterapisi alanlarında eğitimlerini tamamlamıştır.
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