http://orcid.org/0000-0001-6105-0931
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ABSTRACT
Impression management has important implications for success at work. This study explores differences in impression management in the East and West by examining the use of self-promotion, ingratiation, and exemplification directed towards three targets: supervisors, peers, and subordinates among 945 company employees from Japan, Korea, and the United States. Our results show that Korean employees used all three strategies most frequently, followed by United States, and then Japanese employees. Japanese and Korean employees used impression management strategies differentially across the three targets, and U.S. employees used impression management equally across targets. This elucidates how cultural trends in hierarchical relationships impact social behavior within the workplace. A follow-up mediation analysis found that relational or labor mobility fully mediated country differences in impression management, suggesting that culture is also reflected in larger social ecological trends in employee's ability and likelihood to change jobs, which also account for impression management strategy usage. Theoretical and practical implications for international business are discussed. This research may be useful in aligning strategies foreign employees might employ for using impression management when in Japan, Korea, and the United States.
Notes
1 Two additional strategies covered by Bolino and Turnley (Citation1999; Jones & Pittman, Citation1982) include: intimidation and supplication. Intimidation is the use of behaviors, such as bullying and threatening, which encourage others to see the person as distant, powerful, and intimidating. Finally, supplication is where individuals will convey the image that they are needy or weak—purposefully broadcasting their limitations—oftentimes to avoid being assigned a difficult task (Bolino, Citation2003). These impression management strategies are not as commonly investigated in the extant literature (Bolino et al., Citation2008) and were not included in the current analysis.
2 In 2013, only 55% of Korean women in the work force had full-time employment compared to 86% of Korean men. Similarly, only 56% of American women in the work force had full-time employment compared to 73% of American men (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, Citation2015).
3 Given that we had a substantial gender imbalance across our three country groups and that there are some concerns with using unbalanced categories as a statistical control, we also reran our linear mixed-effects models using a system of weights that balanced the influence of our three groups by their gender ratio. For this analysis, we also removed gender as a covariate from the model. The results were highly similar to the unweighted analysis that included gender as a covariate, with the same patterns of statistical significance and approximately the same magnitude of the coefficients. Due to the ease of explanation as well as the fact that statistically controlling for demographic variables is a more common practice in the behavioral sciences, we chose to present the results of the unweighted analysis.
Additional information
Notes on contributors
Alexander Krieg
Alexander Krieg (PhD candidate, University of Hawaii at Manoa) studies the intersection of cultural belief systems, situational factors, and neurobiological influences on psychopathology. His program of research is typically focused in gaining insight toward an understanding of both culture and psychopathology from Japan–U.S. comparisons on self-report, behavioral, and psychological measures. His work has been funded by the Fulbright-Hays DDRA as well as the Crown Prince Akihito Scholarship Foundation.
Li Ma
Li Ma (PhD, Washington University in St. Louis) is a professor of organization management at Guanghua School of Management, Peking University. He studies negotiation, conflict management, and participative management, especially in international contexts. His publications appear in journals such as Journal of International Business Studies, MIT Sloan Management Review, International Journal of Human Resource Management, Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology, Journal of Business Ethics, Leadership Quarterly, Human Relations, Journal of Organizational Behavior, and Management and Organization Review.
Patricia Robinson
Patricia Robinson (PhD, MIT Sloan School of Management) serves on the faculty of Hitotsubashi University Graduate School of International Corporate Strategy. Her research has received an AOM Richman Prize and an AIB Farmer Award. Her current research focuses on cross-cultural team coaching and mediation.