MANY people sit in cramped cubicles imagining the day when they will be promoted to the corner office. But for a rapidly growing percentage of the professional population, this thought is not only unpleasant but fills them with anxiety. An online survey by the consultancy firm DDI that polled 600 global managers in Asia, the Americas and Europe suggests that 59 per cent of the workforce see a promotion as one of the most stressful events of their lives; in many cases more stressful than bereavement. Overall, only divorce was rated as more disturbing.

“Transition anxiety”, as it is called, seems to affect the middle echelons the most, and men more than women (60 per cent of women claimed that they were adjusting well to promotion, compared with 49 per cent of men, although the same group of women said that promotion had an adverse effect on their lifestyles).

Simon Mitchell, a director of DDI who worked on the survey, was surprised by the results: “Our respondents were asked to rate promotion against other life changes and an overwhelming majority said that it came second only to divorce.” What the research – A DDI Study in Leadership Transitions: Stepping Up, Not Off – showed was that although 53 per cent of managers look on promotion as a challenge and an opportunity for change, many more think of it as a poisoned chalice. “The kind of challenges that people face in the work-place have changed,” says Mitchell, “and so has their mindset.”

The paper goes on to suggest ways of lowering “transition anxiety” by identifying leaders and offering coaching to promoted staff.

Adrian Monck, Professor of Journalism at City University, says: “The old saying ‘upwards and outwards’ is so true. Becoming a manager has become less glamorous in finance, the City and even the law. Often you’re managing people who make a lot more money than you do. At one time management was considered a big deal, but now it’s almost public-spirited.”

DDI cited office politics, lack of support and training and more time spent on communication as some reasons why staff increasingly dread promotions. As one respondent said: “We have to rebuild the notion that people are there to help. Sometimes they are there to make you fail.”

Companies such as the stockbroking firm portrayed in the film The Pursuit of Happyness groom staff to become executives and offer a clear view of the professional road ahead. But in many workplaces youth is encouraged and promoted above experience, and the path is no longer straightforward. Furthermore, says Manfred Kets de Vries, Professor of Leadership at the Insead business school in France and a psychoanalyst and executive coach, the result is high levels of anxiety – and leaders thrust into positions that they are ill-equipped to fill.

“Typically,” he says, “a company takes someone who has performed well in a team and puts him in charge even though he has no qualifications. They will take a surgeon and make him head of a hospital. As a surgeon he is taught to focus on the task at hand and continue until it is done; consequently he has no sense of time and makes a rotten manager.”

This tendency to turn the doctor into the consultant and the writer into the editor without training, preparation or desire on the part of the appointee accounts, he says, for the disorder of “impostor syndrome”, in which the person in a job feels that he is “pretending” and could be exposed as a fraud at any time.

“There is a great deal of posturing involved in the modern workforce,” says Professor Kets de Vries, “and with it copious amounts of anxiety.”

The term “impostor syndrome” was first coined in 1974 by the American psychologist Pauline Rose Clance, whose book The Impostor Phenomenon: Overcoming the Fear that Haunts Your Successcaptured a professional Zeitgeist. Some have suggested that it now affects 70 per cent of the working population. The higher the “impostor” climbs in an organisation, the more acute the feeling of being a fraud.

“When someone climbs the first rung of the ladder, everyone applauds,” says Professor Kets de Vries. “After that comes envy, sometimes sabotage and occasionally failure.

“It happens typically when you take someone such as a journalist, who is a field person, and put him or her into a management role,” says Professor Monck. “They go into the new job with high expectations of how those below them should perform.”

When he worked for ITN, Monck was elevated from “field producer” to “management”. He recalls: “I didn’t become any more anxious than usual because I always felt as though I was an impostor. But at first you always think ‘I deserve this role’, then you panic at the thought of actually doing it.

“It’s a bit like that moment in The West Wingwhen Martin Sheen goes from being a candidate to being ‘the office’. You go from being a cosy member of the newsroom to being ‘management’, which is highly competitive and in which there is certainly no brotherhood.”

Middle management is about being safe in numbers; senior management is where the air gets thin and looking behind becomes as important as looking ahead.

The trading floor is probably the best example. A former managing director at Citigroup, who wishes not to be named, says: “If you pluck someone from the trading floor and plop him into a management role that his former colleagues think is beyond his ‘skill set’, the verdict is swift and brutal. No one listens to him, he gets undermined and ultimately is pushed out.”

Even star performers, as soon as they are selected for management, instantly lose their shine. In some City firms, he says, promotion is tantamount to being thrown to the wolves.

Those in senior positions can’t always understand why others may not share their enthusiasm for the job. Ben Evans, co-founder of the London Design Festival and one of the masterminds behind the Blair electoral campaign, was handpicked to work for an advertising agency because of his ability to produce ideas. Being hired was a promotion, but it quickly filled him with anxiety.

“I leapt from matters of state to cheese spread,” he says. “They hired me for my fresh perspective and the whole thing was about thinking out of the box, but I was unprepared. I didn’t understand the language of the organisation and I really needed help. I felt fraudulent because I didn’t speak with the confidence of my peers.”

The more time that Evans spent working on accounts, the greater his anxiety became. “They were all speaking this pseudo-science,” he says, “and I didn’t give a toss about how many housewives in the North bought cheese spread. But eventually you start thinking that there’s something wrong with you.” He stayed on – he didn’t want to admit failure – but now believes that he should have planned an exit strategy from the start.

Jon Stokes, an organisational psychologist, of Stokes & Jolly, a consulting firm, says: “Transition anxiety grows with every level of success because the prospect of failure becomes more and more terrifying. The more you avoid failure, the more frightening it becomes. On some level people begin to wait for it to happen.

“The first promotion may be written off as luck but after that it gets harder. “Because the ‘impostor’ discounts his ‘gifts’ as luck, the easier something comes to him, the more he believes that it will be taken away again.”

In some cases the promoted person has good reason to be worried. Take the members of an emerging pop group, for instance: suddenly, thanks to the internet, they are the best. They are being compared to the Beatles; they are better than Clapton. Of course they feel like frauds.

A former partner in a large London law firm felt like herself again only when she left her job. “I became anxious only after I had been promoted to partner,” she says. “Then I was surprised at my feelings of inadequacy.”

Professor Kets de Vries believes that few of us are equipped to be in managerial positions. “I have identified eight types of worker: strategists, change catalysts, transactors, innovators, processors, coaches, communicators and deal-makers,” he says. “If you put a strategist in control, he will fail because he can’t motivate people. If you put a processor in control, he will run the company meticulously but provide absolutely no leadership. A deal-maker is not interested in teamwork.”

An effective leader, says the professor, needs to be a constellation of all eight types.

Training, mentoring and support from management are helpful to guide someone into a new position, but Professor Kets De Vries argues that many people should simply not be promoted in the first place. “Such people function well when not in a No 1 position,” he says. “They keep their impostor syndrome at bay – but once they are elevated, their weaknesses are clear to all. Executives who feel that they are impostors are afraid to trust their judgment, so they take too long to make decisions and can’t delegate.

“Behind transition anxiety is, of course, fear. The fear of many people is that success will hurt them in some way – that family and friends will continue to like them better if they remain ‘small’.”

The truth is that many of those in comfortable, well-paid, not-too-taxing, clubby jobs with month-long holidays in Provence can think of nothing they would rather do than sit in meetings all day, work late and take phone calls at weekends. Professor Kets de Vries says: “When they offered me the position of dean, I said ‘No thanks’. The higher you go up the organisation, the greater the isolation.”

The Peter Principle – a term invented by Dr Laurence J. Peter in his 1968 book of the same name – states that in a hierarchy every employee tends to rise to his level of incompetence. This seems more applicable now than ever. Promotion is not all it was once cracked up to be.

“Comedians don’t get promoted,” says Professor Monck. “Actors don’t get promoted. The only things that anyone really wants are recognition and more money. You have to hand it to anyone who wants to run the BBC – I mean, would you want that job?”