THE ISSUE

Gaslighting is usually described as something one person does to another. A manipulative boss who tells an employee their perception is wrong. A senior leader who reframes documented misconduct as a misunderstanding. An HR conversation that ends with the complainant questioning their own judgment.

But framing gaslighting as an interpersonal phenomenon misses something critical: in many organizations, gaslighting is not a behavior. It is a process. It is built into complaint architectures, performance review systems, and crisis communication protocols. And when it is embedded in process, it no longer requires a manipulative individual to function. The institution performs the manipulation.

WHAT THE RESEARCH SAYS

The term gaslighting originates in clinical psychology, describing a pattern of manipulation in which a target is made to question their own perception, memory, or judgment. In other words: their reality. In organizational contexts, researchers have extended this concept significantly.

Institutional gaslighting describes how organizations use authority to deny, minimize, or distort people’s accounts of harm, not through individual malice, but through structural responses that prioritize organizational power over factual accountability (Litvintsev & Litvintseva, 2024).

This dynamic is particularly visible in whistleblowing contexts. Research on healthcare workers documents how institutions respond to harm reports in ways that compound the original harm:

The person raising the concern is recast as the problem, their perceptions are questioned, and the organization’s credibility is systematically placed above theirs (Ahern, 2018). Critically, this does not require bad intent. It emerges naturally from systems designed to manage liability, minimize disruption, and protect hierarchy.

Empirical research confirms the organizational reach of this phenomenon. A recent study in the Journal of Management examined gaslighting in leader-employee relationships across four samples. Employees who experienced it reported lower organization-based self-esteem, poorer task performance, higher turnover intentions, more workplace deviance, and weaker commitment to their leader (Ogunfowora & Bourdage, 2026).

The same work separated gaslighting statistically from abusive supervision and social undermining, which means it is not simply another name for bad management. It also found the negative effects to be weaker where employees held more informal power, meaning expertise and standing, relative to their leader.

IN PRACTICE

The research explains the mechanism. The following case shows how ordinary and administrative it can look in practice.

Claudia, my co-author of Breaking Free from Toxic Leadership, experienced this dynamic firsthand early in her career in the Fast Moving Consumer Goods industry. She submitted a vacation request to her supervisor, Paul, through the standard process. Weeks later, Paul claimed he had never received it. When Claudia returned from her leave, she was confronted as though she had gone on vacation without authorization.

The shock came when she found her original request, crumpled, discarded in the trash bin where Paul had thrown it.

This was not a case of forgetfulness. It was a deliberate act, dressed up as an oversight, that placed the burden of proof entirely on Claudia. She had to defend a decision she had made correctly, using a process the organization itself had designed and mandated. The system offered her no protection: no record requirement independent of her supervisor, no verification step, no institutional mechanism that did not rely entirely on Paul’s word against hers.

That is not an isolated failure of one manager’s integrity. It is a demonstration of how little structural protection approval processes often actually provide, and how easily an organization’s default posture sides with hierarchy over documentation.

THE STRUCTURAL QUESTION

How does an organization build a process that gaslights without anyone intending to gaslight? Three mechanisms tend to recur:

1. Asymmetric information control. In most formal investigations, the organization controls what evidence is collected, how it is interpreted, and what findings are disclosed, and to whom. The complainant rarely has access to the full investigation file. This asymmetry makes it structurally impossible for them to challenge findings effectively, even when those findings are incomplete or selectively framed.

2. The neutrality fiction. Organizations routinely describe internal investigations as independent and objective. In practice, the employer funds the investigation, defines its mandate, and effectively acts as prosecutor and judge simultaneously (Kuldova & Nordrik, 2023). Internal investigators, whether employees or retained advisors, carry ongoing organizational dependencies that make true neutrality structurally unavailable.

The fiction of neutrality is itself a form of institutional gaslighting: it tells the complainant that the process is fair when the conditions for fairness are structurally absent. Research confirms that unconscious bias almost certainly affects fact-finding even in formally “neutral” investigations (Lattal, 2016).

3. Outcome-oriented framing. Most complaint processes are designed around a binary: substantiated or unsubstantiated. This framing systematically erases the middle ground: patterns of behavior that are real and documented but do not meet a legal or disciplinary threshold. When an organization says “we found no evidence of misconduct,” it is often more accurate to say “we found evidence that does not trigger our existing response protocols.”

Those are very different statements. Presenting the first while implicitly neglecting the second is a governance failure, and, for the person who raised the complaint, an experience of institutional gaslighting.

The corrective is not to make organizations more empathetic. It is to redesign the architecture: independent investigation mechanisms, transparent disclosure standards, outcome categories that reflect the full spectrum of findings, and governance oversight that is not conducted by the same hierarchy being investigated.

ONE TAKEAWAY

When an organization concludes an investigation and the person who raised the concern walks away doubting their own experience, that is not an unfortunate outcome. It is a diagnostic. It tells you something precise about the design of the process, and about what the process was actually built to protect.

The question for boards, works councils, and governance bodies is not whether gaslighting is intentional. Intent is beside the point. The question is whether your complaint architecture, by its design, systematically produces that effect. If it does, the outcome is the same regardless of intent.

Have you seen a complaint process that protected the organization more than the person who raised the concern? I’d like to hear about it.

Markus

Correction, 15 August 2026. An earlier version of this issue listed emotional exhaustion among the outcomes measured by Ogunfowora and Bourdage (2026). It was not among them. The passage now names the outcomes the study actually reports, and adds its findings on construct separation and informal power. The error was mine, and given what this newsletter is about, I would rather mark it than quietly replace it.

This essay first appeared on 18 July 2026 in my LinkedIn newsletter Toxic by Design.

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Sources

Ahern, K. (2018). Institutional Betrayal and Gaslighting: Why Whistle-Blowers Are So Traumatized. The Journal of Perinatal & Neonatal Nursing, 32, 59-65. DOI: 10.1097/jpn.0000000000000306

Kuldova, T. & Nordrik, B. (2023). Workplace investigations, the epistemic power of managerialism and the hollowing out of the Norwegian model of co-determination. Capital & Class, 48, 463-488. DOI: 10.1177/03098168231179971

Lattal, A. (2016). The Hidden World of Unconscious Bias and its Impact on the “Neutral” Workplace Investigator. Journal of Law and Policy, 24, 3.

Litvintsev, D. & Litvintseva, G. (2024). Institutional Gaslighting: How Institutions Distort our Reality. Journal of Institutional Studies. DOI: 10.17835/2076-6297.2024.16.1.074-084

Ogunfowora, B. & Bourdage, J. (2026). Is My Boss Gaslighting Me? Uncovering the Nomological Network of Gaslighting in Leader-Employee Relationships. Journal of Management. DOI: 10.1177/01492063261426014