EMPIRICAL-ASSESSMENT OF IMPRESSION MANAGEMENT BIASES - THE POTENTIAL FOR PERFORMANCE-APPRAISAL ERROR

This experimental study used senior university students in a business curriculum to explore the role of impression management as a bias in a performance appraisal setting. Subordinate performance and the gender of both raters and ratees were also included as factors in the study. As expected, findings show that performance is the primary determinan t of appraisal scores as a main effect where all evaluation measures w ere significant at the p < .001 level. Performance also interacted sig nificantly with both the subordinate gender and rater gender variables . Impression management, both as a main effect and in interaction with ratee gender, was also found to influence performance appraisal score s, although to a lesser extent than performance. Defensive impression management tactics, including apologies and excuses, were generally fo und to have a negative influence on evaluations. The gender variables were only significant when interacting with performance and impression management conditions.