UpTrajectory Review

A new survey covered by CPA Practice Advisor finds that a majority of American workers—more than half—say they have experienced gaslighting in the workplace. The term has migrated from clinical psychology into everyday HR vocabulary, and the finding suggests it has become a mainstream feature of office life rather than an edge case. The available text is thin, but the core claim is stark: this is not a fringe phenomenon affecting a narrow slice of the workforce. It is widespread enough that most employers, knowingly or not, have it happening inside their walls. For a term that gets thrown around loosely on social media, a survey-backed majority gives it uncomfortable weight.

For a small-business owner or manager, this is not a headline you can shrug off as a big-company problem. Small teams amplify every interpersonal dynamic. When one employee gaslights another—rewriting history, denying conversations, undermining someone's confidence in their own memory—the damage lands harder because there is no HR buffer, no anonymous hotline, and no layer of management to absorb it. The source notes that affected workers report diminished trust, lower confidence, and a reduced willingness to speak up. In a five-person shop, that silence is not an abstraction. It means the person closest to the problem stops flagging errors, stops offering ideas, and eventually leaves—and you may never learn why.

What is worth pausing on is the word itself. 'Gaslighting' has been stretched in popular usage to cover everything from deliberate psychological manipulation to a boss who simply changes their mind. A survey that lets respondents self-define the term risks inflating the number. That said, even if some respondents are using the term loosely, the underlying behaviors—chronic contradiction, credit theft, reality-denial—are real and corrosive regardless of what we call them. We are skeptical of precise percentages built on a contested definition, but we are not skeptical of the direction. The workplace has a truth problem, and this survey is one more data point confirming it.

The downstream effects deserve more attention than the headline gives them. Workers who stop trusting their own perceptions do not just become quieter—they become less accurate. They second-guess documentation, avoid putting things in writing, and disengage from decisions where their input matters. For a business owner, that translates into operational drag: slower handoffs, missed red flags, and a culture where problems surface only after they become crises. There is also a legal dimension the source text does not touch. Persistent psychological manipulation can bleed into harassment or constructive-discharge claims, and in a small company without formal HR infrastructure, the owner's own behavior—however unintentional—may be the behavior in question.

The practical takeaway for operators is to treat this as a systems issue, not a personality issue. If your team is small enough that you are the entire management layer, build habits that make reality verifiable: confirm decisions in writing, keep shared records of commitments, and create at least one channel where an employee can raise a concern without going through the person causing it. That might be a quarterly one-on-one with an outside advisor, a simple anonymous feedback form, or a standing practice of documenting key conversations. None of this requires an HR department. It requires the discipline to make 'what was actually said' checkable rather than a matter of who has more power in the room.

“Workers report that these experiences can affect their trust, confidence, and willingness to speak up.” — CPA Practice Advisor

Takeaway: If more than half of workers say they've been gaslit, assume it's happening on your team—build written records and a safe escalation channel before it costs you your best people.