The Impression Management And Its Relations With Implicit Attitude And Organization Behavior

Impression management is a process in which a person tries to affect others' impression of him/her. In recent years, impression management has increasingly received much attention in psychology and organizational science and has become a very important research variable.At present study, the impression management and its relations with implicit attitude and organization behavior were tested. This paper including two parts, the former is an experimental study and, the later is a survey study.The purpose of this experimental study was to examine the relation of impression management and implicit attitude and to verify the model of dual attitudes. 225 freshmen participated in a test of self-monitoring scale (SMS) and 70 were selected as subjects with 35 as a high self-monitoring group and 35 as a low self-monitoring group. Then the 2 groups both accepted implicit associate test (IAT). The results showed that the 2 groups exhibited same implicit attitude that verified the model of dual attitudes. This result also indicated that the attitude changing of high self-monitoring subjects after forced compliance was makeshift. This did support the result of Song Guangwen and Chen Qishan's experiment in 2003. This result enriched the content of the theory of social cognition.In part two, 414 managers and employees were assessed by questionnaire. The questionnaire including self-monitoring sale (SMS), internality, powerful others, and chance scale (IPC), Chinese organization citizenship behavior scale (COCB), measuring ingratiatory in organization settings scale (MIBOS), and so on. SPSS 10.0 and LISREL8.50 were applied to analyze the data. The methods and results are as follows.Base on the previous studies of these areas and using the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), the psychological structure of organization citizenship behavior scale (OCB), and measuring ingratiatory in organization settings scale (MIBOS) were analyzed. The result indicated that OCB included three factors: identification with the company, altruism toward colleagues, and conscientiousness. MIBOS is carried out with three factors, which were opinion conformity, other enhancement, and favor rendering. And the measurement of reliability and validity reach to an idealized level.Base on the factor analysis of OCB and MIBOS, one-way ANOVA and correlate analysis were used to further analyze relations with those individual factors and organization behavior. There were differences between male and female employees in impression management, identification with the company, opinion conformity, other enhancement, and favor rendering. Male was higher than female. The correlationanalysis showed that age was positively related to powerful others, but it was negatively related to impression management and favor rendering. Educational level was negatively related to internality, altruism toward colleagues and conscientiousness. Working hours was negatively related to impression management, other enhancement and favor rendering. The position was negatively related to powerful other sand chance, but it was positively related to identification with the company, opinion conformity and other enhancement.And then, path analysis technique was used to test the effects of impression management and locus of control on organization behavior under working settings. This study tested the relationships among impression management, locus of control, OCB and MIBOS, two structural equation models were set up, LISREL was used to test the models, the data fitted both models well, and both had good fit indexes. The models 1 suggested that impression management and internality played significantly positively predictive roles on organization citizenship behavior, but the predictive roles which was played by powerful others is negatively. The models 2 suggested that impression management still played significantly positively predictive roles, but there were complicated relationships between IPC and MIBOS. Powerful others played negatively predictive roles on opinion conformity and favor rendering. Chance played significantly positively predictive roles on opinion conformity and other enhancement. Internality played negatively predictive roles on other enhancement, but positively predictive roles on favor rendering.Finally, suggestions and new directions were proposed on the research of implicit social cognition, organization citizenship behavior, and impression management, in particular, their applications in organizational behavior.