The Effect Of Applicants' Impression Management Behaviors On Interviewers' Rating

As one of the research area on self in social cognition, impression management refers to people consciously or unconsciously control the images that are projected in social interactions to elicit others perceive them as a particular image. Based on employment interview in an organization, applicants' impression management, which is an important branch of impression management, discusses how such behaviors and interviewers' rating on them interact with each other.Under the real context of unstructured interview and with questionnaires, this study explores what impression management behaviors that would be adopted by applicants with certain personality, and how these behaviors influence interviewers' rating. At the same time, it also focuses on whether or not interviewers' perceptions of impression fit for applicants can mediate ultimate interview outcomes, and whether or not their personality implicitly influences their evaluations and choices for applicants with different personality. The main results are following:(1) This study compiles Applicants' Impression Management Tactics Questionnaire, which operationally measures applicants' impression management behaviors under the context of employment interview from six aspects: target commitment, self-promotion, opinion conformity, other enhancement, protective behaviors and active nonverbal behaviors. Through analysis, it has good validity and reliability. Besides, the Interviewers' Rating Questionnaire measures interviewers' rating in employment interview from two aspects: impression fit and overall rating. Through analysis ,it also has good validity and reliability.(2) Applicants' different tendency on Big Five personality could influence their choices for impression management tactics during interview and their self-monitoring styles as well.(3) Different impression management tactics could influence interviewers' perceptions of "impression fit" (containing: person-job fit, person-organization fit, and applicant-interviewer similarity); but applicants' different self-monitoring styles couldn't have similar effect on interviewers.(4) In decision-making of interview, interviewers' different perceptions for applicants on person-job fit, person-organization fit, applicant-interviewer similarity could lead different forecasts on interview outcomes. Therefore, interviewers' perception of "impression fit" could mediate interview rating.(5) The "similarity" and "complement" of Big Five personality between applicants and interviewers would promote interviewers' positive evaluations on applicants, and increase the possibility of successful interview. But the "complement" between their self-monitoring styles could partly increase the possibility of successful interview. Besides, it is necessary to reinforce interview training for interviewers.