The Study On The Structure Of Salesmen's Impression Management Tactics

Impression Management (IM) refers to this kind of action in which individual endeavors to influence other's attitude and opinion toward him by controlling information he leaves to others during interaction and self-identification. This common action reflects that individual intends to beautify himself so as not to disfigure his image.Salesmen's impression management tactics refers to those salesmen took some verbal or non-verbal conduct to create a positive impression to customers. Currently, there is no empirical study of the structure of salesmen's impression management tactics in China.In this study, based on collection and analysis of the Impression Management, the open questionnaire investigation and structural interview, we explored and confirmed the structure of Salesmen's impression management tactics with the methods of exploratory factor analysis and confirmatory factor analysis. Then, regression analysis was used to study the influence of Salesmen's self-effaccy & job involvement to the Impression management tactics. At last, variance analysis was used to study the demographic effects on salesmen's impression managemetn tactics.The results showed: (1) The structure of salesmen's impression management tactics comprises four factors: Production Introduction, Self-presentation, Customer Ingratiation, Opinion Conformity, (2) The result of confirmatory factor analysis showed that the four-factor-model is the best one. (3) Salesmen's self-efficacy influenced the Production Introduction, Self-presentation and Customer Ingratiation; Salesmen's job involvement influenced the Production Introduction and Opinion Conformity. (4) Five demographic variables, sex, educational level, occupation, the fixed number of sales year, Industry background have significant effects on Impression Management tactics.