Impression Management Tactics in the Workplace: Enhancing or Compromising the Employee Performance?

Abstract

Employees use impression tactics to create a specific self-image in the workplace, consciously or unconsciously. Such tactics have been classified into positive and negative tactics, with the former including self-promotion, ingratiation, and exemplification, and the latter including intimidation and supplication. Positive tactics generally lead to favorable outcomes, for instance, high-performance ratings, while negative tactics lead to the opposite. However, categorizing impression management tactics into positive and negative may not be entirely accurate, and our research findings challenge this traditional classification. An online self-report measure survey was implemented, involving 313 employees working in government and private organizations in Bengkulu, Indonesia. Hypothesis testing using Hierarchical Regression Analysis revealed that impression management tactics strongly affect contextual performance, followed by task and adaptive performance. In particular, our research findings indicate that self-promotion tactics hurt adaptive performance, while ingratiation tactics positively affect task, adaptive, and contextual performance. Exemplification tactics positively affect task performance and contextual performance, while intimidation tactics negatively affect task, adaptive, and contextual performance. Supplication tactics, on the other hand, negatively affect task performance and contextual performance but positively impact adaptive performance.

Keywords

• impression management
• task performance
• adaptive performance
• contextual performance