Facades of conformity are false representations created by employees to appear as if they embrace organizational values. I present a conceptualization of the facades of conformity construct and propose that organizational reward systems, minority status, and self-monitoring are examples of variables likely to serve as antecedents to creating facades of conformity. I also propose that psychological and emotional distress are potential outcomes to facade creation. I conclude with a discussion of theoretical and practical implications for continued research on facade creation.

When employees feel that their values do not match those of the organization, they often respond by pretending to fit in. We examine how leader integrity influences the tendency to create facades of conformity, proposing that employees will actually fake more when leaders are principled. In a laboratory experiment (Study 1), undergraduate students whose values ostensibly differed from those of other discussion group members and the university administration created more facades when they perceived the discussion group leader as having high integrity. A two-wave survey of employed adults (Study 2) replicated the moderation effect and also revealed negative effects of facade creation on work engagement. In both studies, our results indicate that, ironically, when leader integrity is high, the tendency to create facades of conformity in response to low values congruence is magnified. Additionally, our findings reveal that positive attributes in leaders may not always result in positive responses from followers. The results from our study also show that facades of conformity may serve as a partial explanatory mechanism in the relationship between values congruence and employee engagement.

Racial slurs are prevalent in organizations; however, the social context in which racial slurs are exchanged remains poorly understood. To address this limitation, we integrate three intergroup theories (social dominance, gendered prejudice, and social identity) and complement the traditional emphasis on aggressors and targets with an emphasis on observers. In three studies, we test two primary expectations: (1) when racial slurs are exchanged, whites will act in a manner more consistent with social dominance than blacks; and (2) this difference will be greater for white and black men than for white and black women. In a survey (n = 471), we show that whites are less likely to be targets of racial slurs and are more likely to target blacks than blacks are to target them. We also show that the difference between white and black men is greater than the difference between white and black women. In an archival study that spans five years (n = 2,480), we found that white men are more likely to observe racial slurs than are black men, and that the difference between white and black men is greater than the difference between white and black women. In a behavioral study (n = 133), analyses showed that whites who observe racial slurs are more likely to remain silent than blacks who observe slurs. We also find that social dominance orientation (SDO) predicts observer silence and that racial identification enhances the effect of race on SDO for men, but not for women. Further, mediated moderation analyses show that SDO mediates the effect of the interaction between race, gender, and racial identification on observer silence.