Impostor Thoughts – Basima Tewfik

"I am not as good as they think I am"; "I'll be uncovered at some point", "They certainly made a mistake having me here", etc, etc. You might think you're the only one having those thoughts but you're not. 70% of people and leaders have them. Hear in this episode what this means to you, your people, and your teams, and how to manage this for success. Professor Basima Tewfik shares with us here years of research on impostor thoughts and also request-declining at work. A great chat many of us need!

"Work is about relationships."

MEET OUR GUEST Basima Tewfik Career Development Professor and Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies at MIT Sloan.

Basima Tewfik is the Class of 1943 Career Development Professor and an Assistant Professor of Work and Organization Studies at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

Her main stream of research examines the psychology of the social self at work. In particular, she seeks to define new conversations around two underexplored phenomena in the organizational literature that implicate the social self: Workplace impostor thoughts (popularly known as impostor syndrome), defined as the belief that others overestimate one’s competence at work, and request-declining at work, defined as the active decision not to help others at work. In a secondary stream of work, she examines effective employee and workgroup functioning in the modern workplace, an increasingly important topic given the rising complexity of work. 

Her dissertation, entitled “Impostor thoughts as a double-edged sword: Theoretical conceptualization, construct measurement, and relationships with work-related outcomes” was named the winner of the 2018 INFORMS Dissertation Proposal Competition. Her work has additionally received recognition from the Society for Personality and Social Psychology, the International Association for Conflict Management, and the Academy of Management. She was named by Poets & Quants as a “40 Under 40” Best Business School Professor in 2021 and by Thinkers50 as one of 30 thinkers to watch in 2022.

Prior to her graduate studies, Basima worked as a management consultant at Booz & Company, engaging with national as well as global clients across a wide range of industries including financial services, healthcare, education, and aerospace and defense.

She received her PhD in management (Organizational Behavior) from the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania and her AB, summa cum laude, in psychology with a secondary degree in economics from Harvard University.