The Paradox of Internal Comms
How Corporate Rhetoric Undermines Trust During Organizational Transitions
Photo by Shoeib Abolhassani on Unsplash
Organizational transitions—restructures, leadership changes, strategic pivots, dissolutions, or shifts in operating models—represent moments of heightened sensitivity inside an institution. Employees look for stability, clarity, and meaning. Leaders, conversely, face pressure to manage perception, maintain morale, and protect productivity. This tension often produces a familiar phenomenon: rhetorical internal communication—language that sounds transparent but conveys little substantive information.
Phrases like “open dialogue,” “ongoing transparency,” and “psychological safety” appear frequently in these contexts. Yet beneath their polished surface is a paradox that scholars such as Schein (2010), Argyris (1991), and Edmondson (2019) have observed repeatedly: the very rhetoric meant to reassure employees often erodes trust over time. This essay explores the psychology behind rhetorical communication, why leaders rely on it, what candor actually signals, and how buzzwords may buy time but never stability.
Why Leaders Default to Rhetorical Language
Leaders do not typically rely on vague or symbolic communication because they are insincere. Rather, rhetorical language emerges from structural, psychological, and cultural pressures that converge during periods of uncertainty. Several key drivers explain its prevalence.
Information Is Incomplete or Fluid: During transitions, leaders often do not yet have definitive answers. Decisions may still be under review, multiple possible paths may exist, and key stakeholders may not align. Rather than risk sharing details that could soon contradict themselves, leaders opt for broad language such as “we are evaluating options” or “more information will follow.” Argyris (1991) notes that such ambiguity is a classic “defensive routine” designed to prevent embarrassment or exposure.
Fear of Morale Decline: Leaders frequently assume employees cannot handle uncertainty. They fear candor will trigger worry, disengagement, or resistance. Organizational psychology shows the opposite: employees tolerate uncertainty better when they understand its scope and logic. But leaders, anxious about maintaining productivity, default to rhetoric that implies stability without confirming it.
Talent Flight Risk: In knowledge and creative industries especially, leadership worries that candor may prompt people to seek more stable environments. Vague reassurance becomes a retention tactic. While this may work in the short term, the long-term erosion of credibility can create the very flight risk leaders hoped to avoid.
Legal and Policy Constraints: Sometimes leaders simply cannot disclose certain details—due to employment law, confidentiality, pending approvals, or strategic risk. When silence is not an option, rhetoric fills the gap.
Discomfort with Emotional Fallout: Most leaders are not trained for emotionally complex conversations. They may intellectually support transparency but lack the relational skill set to manage employees’ reactions to incomplete or difficult news. Polished language becomes a psychological shield.
Narrative Management and Brand Voice: Organizations are storytelling entities. They rely on coherent narratives to maintain culture, attract clients, and shape identity. Leaders may feel pressure to maintain a consistent storyline even when reality is uncertain, creating communication that is more about maintaining “brand tone” than about offering actionable information.
Structural Distance Between Executives and Employees: The higher one rises in an organization, the less direct contact one has with the front line. Leaders may underestimate how strongly employees feel shifts in tone and message. What feels like “stabilizing” communication to executives may feel evasive to those below.
Taken together, these forces create an environment where rhetorical communication becomes not only common but normalized. Yet each of these drivers has unintended consequences.
What Candor Actually Signals in Organizational Life
Despite leaders’ fears, candor—when delivered responsibly—produces a different psychological effect entirely. Research by Edmondson (2019) on psychological safety shows that clarity, even when incomplete, fosters trust, engagement, and long-term resilience. Candor communicates several powerful signals.
Competence and Mastery: When leaders can explain what they know, what they do not know, and why information is pending, they demonstrate intellectual rigor. Rather than looking unprepared, they appear grounded.
Integrity and Moral Courage: Candor demonstrates alignment between values and behavior. Employees respect leaders who avoid over-promising or disguising uncertainty behind optimistic spin. Schein (2010) emphasizes that credibility is built not through polished values statements but through visible, enacted behaviors.
Respect for Employee Intelligence: Candor communicates: I trust you to handle complexity. This is profoundly stabilizing. It conveys adult-to-adult communication rather than parent-to-child reassurance.
Emotional Authenticity: Employees intuitively sense when leaders are withholding. Candor disarms anxiety by acknowledging the emotional reality of the moment, even without solving it.
Predictability: When leaders set expectations—“We will know more in two weeks,” “Here are three scenarios we are evaluating”—employees feel anchored. Predictability reduces rumor cycles.
Shared Ownership of Reality: Candor invites participation rather than passive consumption of messaging. It allows employees to orient themselves responsibly within the evolving landscape.
In short, candor stabilizes through respect, while rhetoric stabilizes through control. One approach cultivates trust; the other cultivates dependency and skepticism.
Why ‘Buzzwords’ Buy Time but Not Stability
Polished, high-level language performs a soothing function, but only temporarily. Words like “alignment,” “transparency,” “open communication,” and “people-first leadership” often mask an absence of concrete information. Employees learn to recognize these patterns as symbolic performances rather than functional communication.
The consequences, documented by Kotter (2012) and others, are predictable.
Diminished Credibility Over Time: Once employees notice the gap between rhetoric and reality, even honest future communications may be doubted. Trust is cumulative but can be undone quickly.
Heightened Sensitivity to Subtext: When surface-level meaning becomes unreliable, employees shift to reading tone, timing, and body language. This fuels interpretation, rumor, and internal storytelling.
Erosion of Psychological Safety: Buzzwords create the illusion of openness without the actual practice of it. When employees hear the language of safety but do not experience the behavior of safety, distrust deepens.
Passive, Not Active, Engagement: Rhetorical messaging asks employees to wait. Candor invites them to prepare, understand, and engage. Repeated buzzwords teach employees to emotionally hold their breath.
Slow Cultural Fracturing: Small misalignments accumulate into cultural drift. Employees begin to see leadership less as partners and more as gatekeepers of inaccessible information. Over time, this contributes to disengagement, skepticism, and misalignment between teams.
Buzzwords soothe in the moment, but they do not build the strong relational infrastructure that organizations require to navigate sustained transitions.
The Core Paradox
The paradox of internal comms is this:
Leaders rely on rhetorical reassurance because it feels safe to them.
Employees rely on clarity and candor because it feels safe to them.
These needs are not aligned.
They create a structural tension that must be navigated, not ignored.
In the long arc of organizational life, the lesson is consistent across research and practice: clarity outperforms comfort. Candor fosters trust, psychological safety, and shared resilience. Rhetoric buys time but often spends trust to do so. Leaders who learn to communicate with grounded honesty—even within necessary constraints—create environments where employees can engage uncertainty with maturity rather than fear.
Organizations cannot avoid transitions. But they can choose whether their communication during these transitions becomes a source of stability or a spark of distrust. The difference lies not in the polish of their language but in the courage behind it.
