Some leaders see threats everywhere. A colleague’s suggestion becomes a power play. A team member’s question becomes insubordination. Constructive feedback becomes a personal attack. When scepticism tips into chronic distrust, it doesn’t merely damage relationships. It derails leadership effectiveness.
These are clear signs of workplace cynicism. Scepticism serves leaders well when it sharpens judgment and uncovers hidden risks. But when it becomes excessive, leaders appear mistrustful, negative, and hypercritical, damaging the very teams they lead.
Signs of Workplace Cynicism
The three core Hogan personality assessments together measure personality strengths, derailers, and values. Derailers or dark-side personality characteristics are assessed using the Hogan Development Survey (HDS). These are behaviours that are overused during times of stress, pressure, complacency, or boredom. Sceptical is a scale on the HDS that evaluates the potential for vigilant and perceptive behaviour to cause derailment of a person’s performance.
The HDS Sceptical scale measures behaviours ranging from having confidence in others to expecting disappointment and holding grudges. People with higher Sceptical characteristics tend to be sensitive to criticism and resist trusting others. Depending on context, they can seem critical, defensive, suspicious, or argumentative. Yet they also tend to be socially insightful, perceptive about motives and intentions, and savvy decision-makers. Like all of the HDS derailers, Sceptical can be a strength when managed strategically.
So, what pushes some leaders past insightfulness into cynical, mistrustful behaviours?
Why People Become Cynical
Cynicism is often associated with self-protection from negative emotions: worry, anger, sadness, fear. For instance, a leader who displays high Sceptical behaviour might suspect that one colleague’s email hides a personal agenda. Very likely in the past, the leader perceived themselves to be criticised or harmed by someone with ulterior motives. Now they stay alert for deception everywhere so that they don’t get hurt again.
Foreseeing what could go wrong is valuable, but constantly expecting it to happen isn’t. Healthy scepticism—say, during a merger—can help illuminate politics and guard organisational interests. Likewise, a leader’s ability to identify problems can prevent mistakes and protect their team. When this vigilance devolves into fault-finding and consistently negative feedback, it stops being advantageous.
Being unforgiving and extremely slow to trust does not typically create team psychological safety, a shared belief that the team is safe. A distant leader erodes trust, which is key to building and maintaining a high-performing team. When leaders resist engaging with other people to protect themselves from possible harm, they send the message that they believe they’re better off alone. This exemplifies workplace cynicism at its worst.
How to Manage Too Much Scepticism
Sceptical behaviour without any guardrails or limitations can harm teams. For someone who tends to be suspicious or mistrustful, seeing the value in leadership development can be hard. Leaders who exhibit workplace cynicism must recognise how they’re perceived by others. This thought exercise can help: how could having a Sceptical reputation create barriers or cost opportunities for you and your team?
A high Sceptical leader needs to acknowledge that bad things don’t always come to pass. A skilled coach can help facilitate a leader’s mindset shift from assuming the worst to holding more realistic expectations. Their past experience can help validate this point of view. The leader may have initially doubted someone’s advice but later found it effective. Or they initially felt criticised but later recognised positive intent.
A useful development goal would be to deliberately confide in others at work, thus giving others the opportunity to prove their intentions. Leaders should leverage their social insight to build rapport with their teams and balance negative feedback with authentic praise. Strategic scepticism protects teams; unchecked cynicism isolates leaders.
Expert Contributor
Tony Cao, PhD, is an industrial-organisational psychologist and consultant at Hogan Assessments.
*This article originally appeared on Hogan Assessments.
