earticle

영어

Due to the nature of modern organizations where tasks are becoming more interdependent and team-based work is increasing, today's organizational members are working closely together and experiencing high levels of social interaction. In this background, organizations are increasingly interested in impression management behaviors that intentionally manage and control their impressions that others see in their favor. This study explores the effects of peers' use of impression management tactics on employee impression management motives in Chinese public organizations. For this purpose, this study hypothesized that impression management tactics such as ingratiation, self-promotion, and exemplification used by a peer of the employee, who is a rival of this employee, have a positive effect on this employee’s motives to use the same tactics. In addition, this study attempted to empirically investigate the moderating effects of performance prove goal orientation (prove orientation) in these relationships. The results of the main effects analyzed with a sample of 260 Chinese public employees show that these hypotheses were supported for all three types of impression management tactics. As for the moderating effects, results confirmed that prove orientation further strengthened the positive effects of peers’ use of ingratiation and self-promotion on employees’ motives to use the same tactic. However, the moderating effect of the prove orientation was not significant in the relationship between the peer's use of exemplification and the employee's motive to use this tactic. As an impression management research, this study contributes to extending the understanding of the antecedents of the motives for impression management. The results of this study provide practical implications showing that, in addition to the impression management tactics used by individual members, managers need to pay attention to the influence of peer relationships on impression management motives.