Excessive cynicism in the face of actual positive change is bad, however when you have no power to change something, you resort to cynicism. If your employees feel no power to express themselves over your bad decisions, you've built a truly toxic system.
The tone comes from the top. If criticizing the CEO’s strategy is prohibited as “cynicism,” then lower level leaders throughout the company will take that as license to prohibit criticism of their own ideas. And often that type of criticism is far more productive.
If people are cynical in the face of positive change then that’s only because they have experience with previous examples of ‘positive change’ that turned out to not be positive after all.
