Are You Better Than Me? Competitive Work Climates Fuel Impostorism via Upward Social Comparisons

The impostor phenomenon refers to an experience whereby individuals believe that others overestimate their abilities, prompting fears of being exposed as impostors. Research has predominantly conceptualized impostorism as a trait-based phenomenon and focused on examining individual-level predictors. This offers a limited understanding of how organizational contexts fuel impostorism. To address this gap, we examine the role of organizations’ work climates in eliciting employees’ impostorism. Across six studies, using experimental, single- and multi-waved survey methods ( N = 1,288) we demonstrate that when an organization’s work climate emphasizes competition, employees’ impostorism increases. We further show that this effect is partly explained by employees’ tendency to compare themselves to higher-performing colleagues in such competitive work climates. These findings have important implications for how we conceptualize and understand the impostor phenomenon—suggesting it is a feature not just of particular individuals, but of particular work climates.