Employees likely to hide their mental illness diagnoses
Incompetent. Lazy. Crazy.
Organizational psychologist and West Virginia University researcher Kayla Follmer said these are just a few of the stereotypes employees with mental illnesses face in the workplace.
“There’s still a considerable amount of stigma associated with mental illness,” Follmer said. “Even a lot of researchers unwittingly attribute employees’ negative outcomes to mental illness.”
Follmer’s work, though, suggests that’s not the case.
In a paper published in Group and Organization Management, Follmer, associate professor of management at the John Chambers College of Business and Economics, details the newest round of findings from her study of
279 U.S. adults who have a professional diagnosis of depression or bipolar disorder and are employed at least 20 hours per week.
Her research shows one reason employees may engage in deviant workplace behaviors is the fear of being discriminated against on the job.
“Importantly, fear of discrimination predicted employees’ deviant behavior above and beyond their mental illness symptoms,” Follmer said, suggesting that simply having a mental illness is not the root cause of problematic workplace behaviors.
The participants, who held positions as diverse as animal caretaker, database architect, missionary, housekeeper and engineer, answered three stages of survey questions. They rated the likelihood that they would receive a negative performance evaluation or be overly scrutinized if everyone at work knew about their mood disorder, for example, and indicated whether they agreed or disagreed that the disorder defined them.
Follmer’s analysis of their responses, conducted with coauthors — including Jake Follmer, assistant professor at the College of Applied Human Sciences — explored whether participants believed they were likely to be discriminated against at work because of their mental illness, how the fear of discrimination could prevent them from being authentic in the workplace and the degree to which that fear and inauthenticity could drive participants to harm their relationships with coworkers and employers.
“If you are able to be authentic, that might mean you’re able to freely talk about having a doctor’s appointment, about how you’re feeling that day or about your diagnosis without fear or worry about how it comes across to other people,” Kayla Follmer said. “Or maybe it just means you’re not talking about your mental illness, but you’re also not constantly monitoring how you’re behaving or analyzing what you’re saying, figuring out if this is a safe space or not. In some ways, authenticity is just being able to engage in a way that feels true to yourself without that constant stress or pressure of trying to evaluate how it’s coming across to others.”
How likely an employee is to sabotage their work relationships or their organization depends in part on two factors. There’s their symptom severity: how intense or extensive the symptoms of their mental illness are. And there’s their stigma centrality: the degree to which they see their mental illness as a core part of their identity.
As expected, Follmer found that employees’ fears about discrimination resulted in even greater inauthenticity for people with more severe symptoms of depression or mania.
Follmer, though, didn’t expect the results she discovered when it came to stigma centrality.
“We found that when somebody considers their mental illness as very central to who they are, they were less likely to behave authentically at work. That absolutely was a surprise to us because prior research, particularly related to individuals in the LGBTQ community, has found that when people really hold a part of their identity as central to them, they were more likely to behave authentically. But we found the opposite.”
While Follmer emphasized that the goal “is not to compare groups with regard to who has it worse,” she speculated that one reason stigma centrality works so differently for employees with mental illness could be tied to “differences in societal perceptions of mental illness versus sexual orientation, as well as opportunities for support. You think about June being Pride Month and just how much conversation there was surrounding Pride and opportunities for support groups and programming. There really isn’t that level yet of societal support for mental illness.”
