INCONSISTENCY AND SOCIAL SKILLS AS 2 COMP ONENTS OF SELF-MONITORING

Snyder (1974; 1987) introduced the psychological construct ''self-moni toring''. High self-monitorers are especially attentive to the situati onal appropriateness of their behavior, and they search and use social cues in order to present themselves and to regulate as well as contro l their behavior. Low self-monitorers are less attentive to the social cues and they also do not possess a well developed repertoire of skil ls in order to present themselves. A German version of the self monito ring scale was introduced by Nowack and Kammer (1987), However, these authors found the scale to be composed of two independent subscales, ' 'inconsistency'' and ''social skills''. In our first study (N=431 univ ersity students) we replicated the two factor structure by means of co nfirmatory factor analysis. Model fit turned out to be higher (GFl=.91 ) than for a one-dimensional model (GFl=.83). The two subscales are on ly marginally correlated (r=.14). In addition, inconsistency seems to be of a more defensive and neurotic nature in comparison to social ski lls, in that inconsistency correlates higher with neuroticism (r=.32 v s. r=.-.23), public self consciousness (r=.23 vs. r=-.03) and social d esirability (r=-.39 vs. r=.08). In a second study assessors' ratings o f candidates for supervisory positions in the context of assessment ce nters within an international enterprise were correlated with ''social skills'' (N=58; r=.26; p (<.05) but not with ''inconsistency'' (r=.02 ; ns).