Title: Organisational obscurantism: synthesising prosocial lies with interpersonal relationship at workplace

Authors: Rashid Shar Baloch; Ramsha Ali Baloch; Asfandyar Ali Shar

Addresses: Department of Business Administration, Indus University, Karachi, Pakistan ' Ojha Campus, DPT Department, Dow University of Health Science Ojha, Karachi, Pakistan ' National University of Modern languages (NUML), Hyderabad Campus, Sindh, Pakistan

Abstract: It is always an arduous task to prevail upon employees to talk about lying, subterfuge, ingratiation and deceptive attitudes at the workplace. To find out deceptive attitude is existing, is difficult but to make people understood is more difficult. People lie for different causes, that can be determined and may be driven by greed, undue favours and advantages, promotions, fear, or even an organisational culture that encourages it. However, employees' trust embedded in perceptions of benevolence is not undermined by deception, which may likely to be improvised. Development of prosocial lies at the workplace for the sake of interpersonal relationship is quite common in our sugar industry and it relates to organisational policies to keep information obscure from an organisational citizen. In this study, we analysed that how organisational obscurantism develops under prosocial lying, deceptive attitude for advantages, employees' general deceptive attitude, managements' general deceptive attitude, and applied deception to maintain good relationships at workplace. We also verified that organisational obscurantism maintained in expectations of employees' euphemistic behaviours immaculately and we demonstrate that employees' prosocial lies, management deceptive attitude, and organisational obscurantism are used for the reliance and establishment of interpersonal relationship at workplace.

Keywords: obscurantism; deceptive attitude; lying; interpersonal relationship; ingratiation; subterfuge.

DOI: 10.1504/IJWOE.2019.104298

International Journal of Work Organisation and Emotion, 2019 Vol.10 No.2, pp.162 - 175

Received: 31 Oct 2018
Accepted: 16 Jul 2019
Published online: 02 Jan 2020 *

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