Performing authenticity: authenticity, visibility and the management of self in a public service organization

“People are always saying congrats to those who post their good work”, explained a Support Officer Manager, describing the organizational culture at Service NSW. This seemingly innocuous statement encapsulates a sophisticated normative control system in which authenticity, visibility and recognition intertwine to shape employee subjectivity.

Late-twentieth- and twenty-first-century management practice has increasingly emphasized “bringing your whole self to work” (Hewlin, 2003), authentic leadership (Gardner et al., 2005) and genuine engagement (Kahn, 1990). This represents a marked departure from earlier bureaucratic and coercive control forms in which compliance was secured through hierarchy, supervision or sanction (Edwards, 1979). In post-Kunda culture-managed organizations, by contrast, control is sought through the cultivation of values, beliefs and identities aligned with organizational interests (Kunda, 1992). Yet paradoxically, calls for authenticity in such settings may themselves constitute refined control mechanisms precisely because they position organizational conformity not as external imposition but as sincere self-expression (Fleming and Sturdy, 2011; Murtola and Fleming, 2011).

This ethnographic study examines how authenticity operates as a normative control principle within Service NSW, a public-sector organization delivering centralized government services across New South Wales, Australia. Through eight months of participant observation and semi-structured interviews, the article traces how organizational members navigate demands for authentic self-presentation while strategically managing their visibility – revealing authenticity not as liberation from organizational constraints but as one of their contemporary manifestations. The argument is structured around a single contribution: the colonization of the discourse of authenticity by normative control. Visibility and recognition are introduced as connected practices through which authenticity-as-control is enacted, observed and rewarded; they are not theoretical contributions in their own right but the mechanisms by which the central contribution operates.

Normative control refers to organizational efforts to shape employee values, beliefs and identities, fostering internalization of organizational interests as personal commitments (Kunda, 1992; O'Reilly and Chatman, 1996). While earlier control forms relied on coercion or compensation, normative control operates through meaning-making, transforming “what employees should do” into “who employees should be” (Alvesson and Willmott, 2002; Barker, 1993). This shift from behavioural compliance to identity alignment represents what Deetz (1998) terms the “colonization of employee subjectivity” – organizations managing not just work but workers' sense of self. Recent reviews of the field highlight both the analytical power of this concept and the increasing difficulty of distinguishing employee internalization from strategic compliance (Colling and Ceulemans, 2023).

The article makes three connected contributions. First, theoretically, it extends scholarship on normative control by showing how the discourse of authenticity – traditionally positioned as a resource for resistance to organizational conformity (Roberts, 2005; Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003) – has been appropriated as a control mechanism that requires continuous emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983) and impression management (Goffman, 1959). Second, empirically, it presents fieldwork-grounded vignettes demonstrating authenticity-as-control in operation across three distinct cultural rituals at Service NSW: a Work-in-Progress (WIP) meeting; a Culture and DNA Strategy session and the narrative of a CEO Award recipient. Third, it specifies the public-sector dynamic, arguing that public-service organizations may be particularly susceptible to authenticity-based normative control because the rhetoric of serving citizens provides an unusually powerful ideological resource for demanding identity and emotional investment from employees (Illouz, 2017; Murtola and Fleming, 2011).

Kunda's (1992) seminal ethnography Engineering Culture revealed how high-tech organizations cultivate strong cultures shaping employee thoughts, feelings and identities. Normative control operates through “culture management”, in which organizational values, rituals and symbols encourage employees to internalize company interests, experiencing organizational success as personal fulfilment (Kunda, 1992; Willmott, 1993). This internalization proves more powerful than traditional bureaucratic control because employees police themselves, monitoring their attitudes and emotions to ensure alignment with organizational expectations (Barker, 1993; Sewell, 1998).

The literature on normative control has expanded considerably in the two decades since Kunda. Colling and Ceulemans' (2023) recent systematic review identifies normative control as both an opportunity (in fostering commitment, meaning and discretionary effort) and a threat (in producing identity exhaustion, self-alienation and organizational dependence). Their review also flags an analytical difficulty that this article takes up directly: that the more sophisticated the control, the harder it is to distinguish from genuine employee buy-in. The article's contribution to this literature is to show how the discourse of authenticity becomes a particularly powerful site of this analytical difficulty, because authenticity, by definition, is supposed to denote precisely the absence of control.

Fleming and Sturdy (2011) draw a useful distinction between two modes of normative control. Soft normative control operates through the discourse of empowerment, autonomy and authentic self-expression: employees are invited to bring their whole selves to work, to express their values and to find personal meaning in organizational mission. Membership is positioned as enabling rather than constraining identity. Hard normative control, by contrast, operates through cultural rituals, peer surveillance and explicit ideology transmission – town halls, awards ceremonies, slogan campaigns and the structured inculcation of organizational values. The two modes typically coexist; the analytical move is to notice when each is in operation.

At Service NSW, both modes are visible and they reinforce one another. The soft mode is represented in the everyday discourse of “authentic self-presentation”, in the language of “our values” and “our DNA”, and in the routine framing of operational pressures (recruitment shortfalls, COVID-19, bushfires) as opportunities for employees to demonstrate their resilience and care. The hard mode is represented in the structured weekly WIP meetings, the Culture and DNA Strategy sessions, the What's Hot Wednesday rituals and the formal CEO Award ceremonies that explicitly celebrate exemplary performances of organizational authenticity. The dynamic between the two is generative: soft normative control invites employees to author themselves in line with organizational values; hard normative control then makes those authored selves observable, comparable and rewardable. The article's finding is that this combination, when applied to the discourse of authenticity, produces a distinctive form of subjectivity – one that experiences organizational conformity as personal expression.

Alvesson and Willmott (2002) theorize identity regulation as the practices through which organizations target employee self-identity to foster desired behaviours and attitudes. Through selection, training, performance management and cultural messaging, organizations promote what Alvesson calls “identity work” – the active, ongoing labour of constructing a self that is recognisable, defensible and aligned with organizational expectations (Alvesson, 2010; Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003). Identity work is particularly intense in knowledge and service settings where the self is, in effect, the product (Noon and Blyton, 2007; Taylor and Bain, 2003). When the organizational injunction is to “bring your whole self to work”, the identity work required of employees is correspondingly more demanding: they must construct a self that is simultaneously authentically theirs and recognisably aligned with organizational values. The findings section of this article traces this identity work in the everyday performances of Service NSW employees – including in the framing of self-promotion as service, in the emotional labour of authentic communication and in the careful management of how one's commitment is made observable to others.

Authenticity scholarship has historically positioned authentic self-expression as antithetical to organizational conformity. Heidegger (1962) conceptualized authenticity as resistance to societal “they-self”, choosing values through individual reflection rather than unreflective social compliance. Existentialist philosophy similarly emphasizes authenticity as personal choice against external imposition (Sartre, 1956). Applied to organizations, this suggests authentic employees would resist normative pressures, maintaining independent values and identities (Roberts, 2005).

However, recent scholarship problematizes this opposition, revealing how organizations appropriate the discourse of authenticity for control purposes. Authentic leadership theory (Gardner et al., 2005; Walumbwa et al., 2008) encourages leaders to “know themselves” and act consistently with self-knowledge – yet organizational contexts circumscribe, which “authentic” selves prove acceptable (Ford and Harding, 2011; Kiaos, 2025). Customer service training demands employees provide “authentic” interactions while following scripted protocols (Fleming, 2009). Personal branding requires “authentic” self-presentation conforming to marketable images (Gershon, 2017).

Murtola and Fleming (2011) sharpen this critique by arguing that contemporary capitalism has commodified authenticity itself: the “truthful self” has become a marketable resource that organizations can extract value from. Illouz (2017) extends this argument, showing how emotions – long understood as the most intimate, most personal aspects of selfhood – are now systematically commodified within work and consumption. In this view, the organizational call for “authentic” employees is best read not as a benevolent invitation to be oneself, but as the contemporary form taken by the long-running project of extracting subjectivity for productive purposes. This creates what Fleming and Sturdy (2011) term “being yourself” as corporate command – organizations demanding employees bring authentic selves while specifying which selves count as sufficiently authentic. The paradox intensifies through recognition systems: employees displaying “proper” authenticity receive rewards and visibility, creating incentives for strategic authenticity performances that may feel inauthentic even as they're labelled authentic (Costas and Fleming, 2009; Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003).

Goffman's (1959) dramaturgical theory conceptualizes social interaction as performance in which individuals manage impressions through strategic self-presentation. Front-stage performances display idealized selves conforming to audience expectations, while back-stage regions enable recovery from performance demands and preparation for subsequent performances. Organizations constitute stages where employees perform professional identities, managing how work, achievements and selves become visible to relevant audiences (Goffman, 1959; Karreman and Alvesson, 2004).

Contemporary workplaces increasingly feature technologies and practices that amplify visibility: enterprise social media platforms (Leonardi et al., 2013; Treem and Leonardi, 2013), open-plan offices (Bernstein and Turban, 2018), performance dashboards (Christin, 2018) and recognition programmes (Stajkovic and Luthans, 2003). These mechanisms make work processes, achievements and professional personas observable across organizational boundaries, transforming visibility from an incidental by-product of work to deliberate strategic activity (Flyverbom et al., 2016; Vaast and Kaganer, 2013).

In the analytical frame developed in this article, visibility is not a separate dimension of organizational life standing alongside authenticity. Rather, visibility is the mechanism by which an employee's authenticity – circumscribed by organizational definition – is rendered observable, comparable and rewardable by the organization. Without visibility, there can be no recognition; without recognition, there is no identity validation; and without identity validation, there is no emotional binding of the employee to organizational ideology. Visibility, in other words, completes the circuit of authenticity-based normative control. Recognition systems perform the parallel function of selecting, on behalf of the organization, which authentic performances will be rewarded and therefore reproduced (Stajkovic and Luthans, 2003). The findings section traces these mechanisms in operation through three vignettes drawn from the fieldwork at Service NSW.

Ethnography is the methodology par excellence for studying normative control. Normative control, by its nature, operates at the level of the taken-for-granted: it shapes what employees come to see as natural, valued and self-evident in their workplace, rather than as something imposed upon them from outside. It is precisely this taken-for-grantedness that survey and interview methods alone struggle to access (Cunliffe, 2010; Kunda, 1992; Watson, 2011). Ethnography's central method – sustained immersion in everyday organizational life – makes visible the routines, rituals, jokes, atmospheric shifts and silences through which normative control reproduces itself. The ethnographer's position as participant observer also makes the researcher available as a mirror to the organization: the way an organization responds to a researcher's presence – the questions it asks of them, the framings it offers them, the spaces it grants and withholds – is itself analytically generative. This article draws on that mirror function in its reflexive analysis below.

Service NSW represents a contemporary public service organization delivering centralized government services across New South Wales, Australia. Established through consolidation of multiple service agencies, the organization operates Service Centres statewide alongside support functions housed in Sydney headquarters. The organization publicly emphasizes customer-centricity, innovation and employee engagement – positioning itself as a progressive departure from traditional bureaucratic public service (Service NSW, 2019).

Access was negotiated through professional connections, culminating in eight months of fieldwork (February–October 2020, interrupted by COVID-19 lockdowns), combining participant observation at headquarters and Service Centres with semi-structured interviews. Initial meetings with senior leadership established research parameters, with an Executive Director particularly interested in “what Service NSW would get” – an inquiry revealing immediate concern with organizational benefit rather than purely supporting scholarly research. This pragmatic orientation characterized many organizational interactions, suggesting normative control operated not just on frontline employees but shaped how research itself got positioned.

I received an access pass and workspace on Level 20 of McKell Building, Sydney – Service NSW's headquarters within the Department of Customer Service. Hot-desking arrangements positioned me adjacent to graduate employees described as “backbones of social inclusion work”, immediately immersing me in daily organizational rhythms. This physical proximity enabled observation of informal interactions, meetings and cultural rituals forming organizational life's fabric.

Service NSW has formally agreed to be named in this published article. The signed agreement letter is provided as a supporting file with this revision. The agreement places no restrictions on the use of quotations or descriptions of organizational events; the author has nevertheless anonymized all individual participants throughout, identifying speakers only by their role (e.g. “Support Officer Manager”, “Service Delivery Executive Director”) rather than by name. Where direct quotations are used, they have been verified against contemporaneous fieldnotes or interview recordings; where the analytical text describes the substance of an exchange without direct quotation, this is signalled in the prose. Ethical approval was obtained from the Human Research Ethics Committee of Macquarie University (Reference Number: 52020546613975).

The empirical material on which this article draws comprises 8 months of participant observation, supplemented by 74 semi-structured interviews with employees across 6 organizational levels (Service Centre frontline staff, Service Centre managers, headquarters program managers, Support Officer Managers, Directors and Executive Directors). Typical interviews ranged from 45 to 90 minutes and explored employees' experiences of organizational culture, their career trajectories, the rituals and rhythms of working life at Service NSW and the language they used to describe their own engagement with the organization. Following ethnographic traditions (Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007; Van Maanen, 2011), data collection remained deliberately open-ended initially, avoiding predetermined frameworks that might prematurely constrain observation. Beyond the semi-structured interview guide and a loosely developed conceptual framework, I resisted extensive pre-fieldwork structuring, allowing organizational patterns to emerge through sustained immersion (Agar, 1986; Wolcott, 2008).

Participant observation encompassed multiple organizational settings: weekly WIP meetings where Executive Directors updated operations; Culture and DNA Strategy sessions revealing explicit efforts at cultural management; What's Hot Wednesday gatherings celebrating achievements; leadership conferences and daily interactions across office spaces. Field notes captured detailed descriptions of physical settings, interaction sequences, emotional displays and my own reactions – attending to both “what happened” and how events felt experientially (Emerson et al., 2011).

Analysis followed grounded theory principles (Charmaz, 2006; Glaser and Strauss, 1967), coding data iteratively to identify patterns, contradictions and theoretical themes. Initial coding remained close to data – using participants' own language (“emic” codes) alongside analytical categories (“etic” codes) (Strauss and Corbin, 1998). Through constant comparison across data sources, codes were grouped into categories and theoretical themes emerged. These themes were refined through ongoing analysis, checking interpretations against additional data and searching for disconfirming evidence (Lincoln and Guba, 1985). The author used Claude (Anthropic) to assist with language editing and clarity. The intellectual content, analysis and conclusions are solely those of the author.

Ethnographic validity requires reflexivity about how researcher presence shapes data (Davies, 2008; Hammersley and Atkinson, 2007). My positioning as an external researcher conducting doctoral work created specific dynamics.

In moments where the researcher was visibly present – particularly in WIP meetings – certain performances appeared more elaborated than they did in the back-stage of office corridors, kitchens and informal conversations. Whether the researcher's presence caused these performances or simply made them salient cannot be determined from the data; what can be said is that the contrast between front-stage and back-stage registers was itself a finding about how organizational members manage authenticity. One Executive Director “shed a tear” during a meeting when managers showed support – a display potentially genuine yet also visibly serving the cultural register expected of authentic leadership at Service NSW. Rather than treating such performances as data contamination, I analysed them as organizational culture's manifestations, revealing how members enact valued identities even (especially?) when observed (Goffman, 1959).

More analytically interesting was the way in which the organization positioned the researcher within its own normative architecture. One of the Executive Director's opening questions – “what does Service NSW get?” – was not a question about research ethics or data access, but a question about value: what would the organization receive in return for granting access. I declined to commit to specific deliverables, framing the research as scholarly and the eventual publication as the only “return”. Maintaining this academic independence was itself effortful: throughout fieldwork, I was offered subject positions – strategic adviser, internal consultant, sympathetic chronicler – that mirrored the value-delivering subject position the organization offers to its own employees. The argument here is narrow but generative: ordinary organizational reluctance to admit researchers is not, in itself, normative control; what was distinctive about Service NSW was that, once admitted, the researcher was offered a value-delivering role consistent with the organization's broader normative architecture. Authenticity-based normative control, that is, extends beyond the formal employee.

Service NSW explicitly positioned authenticity as a core organizational value. “Authentic self-presentations” were positioned as expected member behaviour. However, organizational authenticity proved highly circumscribed, requiring specific emotional displays: thoughtfulness, support, empathy and sympathy, recognition and gratitude towards all members and customers regardless of status. These qualities were not presented as optional personality traits but as normative expectations – what authentic organizational membership looked like.

This vignette illustrates the prescribed character of organizational authenticity. The emotional register is not the spontaneous expression of inner states; it is a cultural script that members reproduce, recognize in one another and reward through quiet warmth. Authenticity here is not the absence of performance; it is a particular, narrow, organizationally valued kind of performance.

External speakers at leadership conferences reinforced this principle. Carefully selected guests shared personal narratives demonstrating how they overcame barriers through authenticity and persistence. A Support Officer Manager described a refugee Muslim woman who started women's football despite cultural prohibitions: “She was an amazing speaker…Just the opportunity to meet people from across the network”. These narratives served ideological functions, demonstrating how “authentic” selves overcome obstacles – implicitly positioning organizational challenges as opportunities for authentic growth rather than structural problems requiring organizational change.

Paradoxically, performing organizational authenticity required significant emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983) – employees managing feelings to produce “authentic” displays. Culture and DNA Strategy meetings revealed this explicitly.

The vignette reveals the ideological work performed by the discourse of authenticity. Negative emotion (exhaustion, demoralization, error) is reinterpreted as a deficit of authenticity rather than as a signal about organizational conditions. Authentic employees, by definition, do not experience their workload as overwhelming; if they do, they are not yet authentic enough. This is normative control in its most distilled form: it does not just tell employees what to do, it tells them what to feel – and frames their feelings, when those feelings deviate, as personal failures of authenticity.

Once organizational authenticity has been defined as a particular emotional and behavioural register, it must be made observable for it to be recognized, rewarded and reproduced. At Service NSW, this work of making one's authenticity observable was systematically organized through multiple mechanisms: the enterprise social platform Workplace, where employees posted achievements and received recognition; weekly WIP meetings showcasing team accomplishments; What's Hot Wednesday celebrations; annual award ceremonies and travelling coaching roles enabling “meeting new people” across Service Centre networks.

Career progression, in this environment, did not depend on doing good work alone. It depended on doing good work in a way that became observable to relevant audiences.

Visibility management created a tension with the prescribed emotional register. Self-promotion – making accomplishments visible, seeking recognition, building professional reputation – could appear inauthentic or self-serving. Yet organizational reward systems demanded precisely this visibility work. The resolution occurred through framing visibility as service rather than self-promotion.

The vignette demonstrates how the paradox of self-promotion is resolved within the experience of the employee. By embedding visibility work within service narratives, employees navigate the contradiction between authenticity (which would seem to forbid self-promotion) and career advancement (which seems to require it). The resolution is achieved not consciously but through the language available within the organization – a language in which travelling, posting, recognizing and being recognized are all reframed as forms of caring for the team and the customer. Authenticity has not disappeared into strategic performance; it has expanded to encompass strategic performance, naturalizing it within the affective register the organization prescribes.

Service NSW maintained an elaborate recognition infrastructure: CEO Awards, local team awards, Workplace congratulations, What's Hot Wednesday celebrations and manager-initiated rewards. These mechanisms made recognition continuous rather than occasional – employees potentially receiving acknowledgment daily through Workplace posts, weekly through meetings and annually through formal awards.

Recognition proved consequential not merely for tangible rewards but for identity validation. As the CEO Award recipient noted: “It was not expected. It was amazing. Yeah, it was incredible”. The surprise and emotional intensity suggest recognition's significance exceeded instrumental career value – it validated identity, confirming that one's self-concept as dedicated Service NSW employee was recognized by others, particularly powerful others. This validation proved particularly potent because recognition came from dispersed sources: “People are always saying congrats to those who post their good work” – including “people they do not know”, extending identity affirmation across organizational boundaries.

Recognition systems served normative control functions by defining which behaviours and identities warranted affirmation. The “Fostering Engagement Award” valorised particular work approaches – engaging others, building relationships, collaborative practice. Award narratives celebrated overcoming barriers through persistence and authentic commitment. What did not receive recognition was equally telling: challenging organizational directions, expressing scepticism about change initiatives or prioritizing work-life balance over organizational demands.

Recognition also intensified emotional investment in organizational ideology. Receiving recognition from colleagues, including strangers, created emotional bonds extending beyond immediate work relationships. As employees narrated, recognition felt “amazing”, “incredible” – powerful positive emotions linking organizational membership with deep satisfaction. These emotional experiences discouraged questioning organizational practices that might threaten identity validation sources. If expressing scepticism about endless change initiatives risked losing recognition and belonging, most employees would choose conformity – experiencing it as authentic commitment rather than coerced compliance.

Moreover, recognition created visibility pressure. Employees who posted achievements received congratulations, thereby creating incentives for continued posting. Those not posting risked invisibility and missed recognition opportunities. This produced visibility escalation – employees competing for attention through increasingly elaborate achievement narratives. Yet this competition was experienced not as pressure but as authentic sharing. The framing positioned visibility work as demonstrating commitment rather than managing impressions, transforming self-promotion into valued organizational behaviour.

This article contributes to scholarship on normative control by showing how the discourse of authenticity – historically positioned as a resource for resistance to organizational conformity – has been appropriated as a control mechanism. The central analytical claim is the colonization of authenticity: the contemporary culture-managed organization does not demand that employees suppress their authentic selves; it specifies which selves count as sufficiently authentic, and rewards conforming performances of those selves through visibility and recognition systems. Conformity becomes identity. Identity becomes what the employee feels – not what they perform. The control is at its most effective when it is invisible to the controlled.

Three points follow from this. First, the analytical move developed here departs from earlier accounts of normative control in which the employee's authentic self was understood to be in tension with organizational demands (Roberts, 2005; Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003). In the cases observed at Service NSW, that tension has been resolved – not by employees rejecting the demands, but by the discourse of authenticity expanding to absorb them. Second, the mechanism of expansion is identifiable: it operates through the prescription of a narrowly defined emotional register, the rendering visible of conforming performances and the systematic recognition of those visible performances. Third, the article offers a vocabulary for this dynamic: authenticity-as-control, where the older language of impression management (Goffman, 1959) and emotional labour (Hochschild, 1983) is updated to account for the fact that employees do not experience themselves as managing impressions or labouring emotionally – they experience themselves as being who they are.

Most normative control research has examined private-sector knowledge-intensive firms (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2004; Kunda, 1992). This study extends understanding to public-service contexts, revealing how New Public Management reforms emphasizing customer service, innovation and performance management have facilitated the adoption of normative control practices in public agencies (Ferlie et al., 1996; Hood, 1991). Service NSW's positioning as a progressive departure from traditional bureaucracy enabled culture management practices resembling private sector approaches while maintaining public service identity.

The empirical claim of this article is that public-service organizations may be more susceptible to authenticity-based normative control than their private-sector counterparts, not less. The reason is straightforward: mission rhetoric provides an unusually powerful ideological resource for demanding identity and emotional investment from employees. Where a private-sector employee can hold organizational mission at arm's length – “it's just business” – a public-service employee is offered, and largely embraces, the framing that their work is in the service of citizens. To resist organizational demands is, on this framing, to resist serving citizens – to fail at the very thing that drew them to the role. The line between authentic personal commitment to public service and authentic personal commitment to the organization is, deliberately, blurred.

Murtola and Fleming's (2011) account of authenticity-as-commodity and Illouz's (2017) analysis of emotions-as-commodities together provide the conceptual ground for this point. Both argue that contemporary capitalism extracts value from precisely the aspects of selfhood that earlier critical theory regarded as outside its reach: feelings, identity, the truthful self. The Service NSW case extends their argument into the public sector, where the same dynamic is at work but uses different ideological resources. The mission of serving citizens – a genuinely valuable public good – is appropriated by the organization's normative architecture as a justification for demanding emotional and identity work that, in a different setting, would be recognisable as exploitation. When operational pressures (COVID-19, bushfires, floods) intensified workload at Service NSW, the organizational response emphasized internal motivation, resilience and adaptability rather than reducing demands or increasing resources. The structural problem of overwork was reframed as the personal problem of insufficient authentic commitment.

The literature on the costs of sustained normative control points to specific long-term effects that the present case foreshadows. Costas and Fleming (2009) describe self-alienation: the experience of being unable to recognize one's own values and feelings as one's own, because they have become so thoroughly imbricated with organizational ones. Tracy and Trethewey (2005) describe the “crystallized self” – a self in which authentic and performed elements are no longer distinguishable, even by the person themselves. The empirical literature on burnout in customer-centric public-service work points to identity exhaustion as a particular risk where employees are required to sustain emotional registers (warmth, helpfulness, gratitude) over long periods, regardless of their inner states (Kiaos, 2026). The analytical implication of the present article is that authenticity-based normative control raises the floor of identity exhaustion: where impression management once required only that employees behave appropriately, authenticity-as-control requires that they feel appropriately. The energetic cost is correspondingly higher.

The most actionable implication of the analysis is for individuals working in culture-managed organizations. The single most important resource employees have for resisting authenticity-based normative control is the analytical move itself: the recognition that the demand for organizational authenticity is, often, the contemporary form taken by the demand for organizational conformity. Once that move is made, employees are in a different relationship with organizational expectations: they can choose what to perform and what to withhold; they can recognize emotional labour as labour; they can hold parts of their identity outside the organization's reach (Kreiner et al., 2006). Sustaining authentic selfhood, paradoxically, may require recognizing that organizational requirements for “authenticity” are precisely what prevent it.

For organizational scholars, the implication is that the discourse of authenticity is now part of the analytical toolkit of normative control, not a separate object of study. Wherever the language of “bringing your whole self”, “our values” or “authentic leadership” appears in an organization's self-presentation, the question to ask is: what specifically counts as authentic here, and what work does that specification do? The further research questions opened up by this analysis include how employees resist authenticity-based normative control once they have named it; whether alternative organizational forms enable genuinely uncircumscribed authentic expression and how digital technologies (enterprise social media, performance dashboards, remote work platforms) reshape the visibility and recognition mechanisms through which authenticity-as-control operates.

It would be naïve to expect organizations whose normative architecture depends on the discourse of authenticity to abandon it voluntarily; the discourse is doing important work for them. The realistic implication for organizations – and specifically for the small subset of organizations willing to interrogate their own normative architecture – is more limited. Genuine support for employee authenticity would require accepting expressions that are organizationally inconvenient: scepticism about change initiatives, critiques of leadership decisions, prioritizing personal over organizational interests. It would mean recognizing that the authentic employee experience of overwhelming demands is exhaustion and resentment, not opportunities for resilience development. Most fundamentally, it would mean acknowledging that employment is an economic relationship in which employees exchange labour for compensation, not an identity relationship in which employees exchange selfhood for recognition.

This article has examined how the discourse of authenticity operates as a mechanism of normative control in a culture-managed public service organization. The central analytical move – the colonization of authenticity – names a contemporary form of organizational control in which conformity is experienced not as imposed but as expressed, not as demanded but as chosen. The three vignettes presented in the findings show this dynamic in operation: at the WIP meeting where the cultural script for authentic leadership is rehearsed; at the Culture and DNA Strategy session where exhaustion is reframed as motivational deficit and in the CEO Award narrative where strategic visibility work is folded into the language of service.

Three lines of further research follow naturally from the argument. First, employee resistance to authenticity-based control is itself an open empirical question: once employees recognize the dynamic, what do they do with it and at what cost? The vocabulary of resistance available within the discourse of authenticity is itself constrained by the discourse, which suggests that resistance, if it occurs, will take forms not yet well documented in the literature. Second, the public-sector dynamic identified in this article warrants comparative work: are there public-service settings (perhaps in heavily unionized or strongly professionalized contexts) where the appropriation of mission rhetoric for normative-control purposes is more difficult? Third, the digital infrastructure of culture management – enterprise social platforms, performance dashboards, the remote-work shift – reshapes the visibility-and-recognition mechanism on which authenticity-as-control depends; that reshaping deserves dedicated attention as a methodological challenge for ethnography as well as a substantive question.

As organizations increasingly emphasize culture, purpose and authentic engagement, critical scholarship must remain attentive to whether these developments liberate or constrain. The risk, as this article has tried to show, is that appeals to authenticity become their opposite – not by failing to deliver authenticity but by succeeding too well in defining what authentic looks like.