The Interactive Impact of Organizational and National Cultures on the Impression Management Strategies of Employees

Abstract

This theoretical article aims to contribute to the literature on the cultural antecedents of employees’ impression management (IM) strategies in the workplace. Studies investigating the impact of cultural values on the IM strategies of employees have mainly examined the role of the institutional environment, namely national culture dimensions. However, studies focusing on how the immediate cultural environment of organizations may influence the IM strategies are scarce. Using the person-situation theory and descriptive and injunctive norm approach to the study of culture, this article provides several propositions on how the organizational cultural values in conjunction and interaction with broader national cultural values may cause variance in the IM strategies of employees. I specifically propose that job-focused and supervisor-focused IM strategies should vary by the degree of performance orientation in organizations, and this causal impact should vary across cultures based on their varying degrees of collectivism and power distance.

Keywords

• impression management
• national culture
• organizational culture
• performance orientation
• collectivism
• power distance