Impression Management

Many companies use scores from personality tests when evaluating job applicants. Meta-analytic evidence suggests that scores from well-developed personality tests are predictive of job performance and other organizationally relevant outcomes, with the strongest findings observed across settings for the trait of conscientiousness. A potentially important issue with many personality tests, however, is the accuracy of responses provided by applicants. The assumption is that applicants will respond to items in a manner consistent with their behavior, producing scores that indicate their trait standing. However, for many personality items it is possible for applicants to respond in a way that enhances their attractiveness to the hiring organization.

For illustrative purposes, consider the personality test item “I am rarely late for appointments” and an associated five-point Likert-type response scale that ranges from strongly disagree to strongly agree. Some individuals tend to respond to this item more toward the strongly agree end of the response scale in an applicant setting than when responding to the same item in a research setting or when taking the test for self-exploration. This phenomenon of changes in responses to such items across motivated (e.g., applicant) and nonmotivated settings has been referred to as impression management, socially desirable responding, intentional distortion, and faking.

Interest in the subject of intentional distortion is probably as old as interest in measuring personality through self-report methods. Although reviews of research on intentional distortion date back to 1946 and much is now known, more knowledge has led to more questions. Indeed, interest and research in this issue are as keen and perhaps as controversial as ever. Through the years, research has focused on four broad questions: (a) Can people distort self-descriptions of their personality? (b) Do applicants distort their self-descriptions? (c) What effect does intentional distortion have? (d) Are there remedies for intentional distortion?