Elsevier

Knowledge-Based Systems

Volume 40, March 2013, Pages 123-133
Knowledge-Based Systems

Do impression management tactics and/or supervisor–subordinate guanxi matter?

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.knosys.2012.12.002Get rights and content

Abstract

This study compares the relative role of impression management tactics and the other form of supervisor–subordinate guanxi (s–s g) in predicting supervisor-rated employee performance. Empirical data were collected from 175 supervisor-subordinate dyads working full-time in Taiwanese organisations. Specifically, this study uses the Dominance-based Rough Set Approach (DRSA) to formulate employee social skills by generating “if–thendecision rules. Then, flow network graphs are applied to represent employee decision rules. The results indicate that the personal-life inclusion of supervisor–subordinate guanxi matters more than various impression management tactics in achieving high performance ratings. Additionally, employees avoiding engaging in the supplication tactic may face in low performance ratings. The findings have implications for many of the decision rules that influence performance ratings from supervisors.

Introduction

Most individuals desire promotion to high-level positions, as well as power associated with such positions, but few successfully realise these desires. Given the enormous variety of direct and indirect collaborative interactions that exist in every industrial workplace, the daily business activities of organisations require employees at several different positions to cooperate and collaborate to achieve common goals. Individuals must manage impressions to achieve their desired goals in work settings [18], [56], [61]. Impression management (IM) refers to the attempt to control images projected in real or imagined social interactions [34], [46], and with various uses [30], [53], [56]. Extant research has addressed the direct relationship between impression management tactics and work outcomes, such as performance appraisal [7], [8], [30], [57], [61], career success [31], [32] and group performance [39].

Although studies have demonstrated the effectiveness of impression management tactics, they have failed to disentangle the effects of impression management tactics from supervisor–subordinate guanxi. The Chinese term “guanxi” (interpersonal connections) as a social and cultural asset in Chinese society is an avenue that individuals and firms can use to promote cooperation and efficiently govern relationships [40]. Supervisor–subordinate guanxi (s–s g) describes the dyadic relationship between subordinates and their immediate supervisors within which they can develop a particular and sentimental relationship via favourable exchanges both inside and outside working hours [13]. Previous research has examined the role of s–s g, which is a key individual variable that enables individuals to obtain network benefits for desired goals [25], [58].

Social influence theory [27], [36] leads us to postulate that impression management tactics and s–s g are important social skills that exhibit an influence on performance ratings. Individuals who have higher social skills understand others and use this knowledge to effectively influence situations so that they will achieve their desired goals than those who have low social skills. Accordingly, this study extends impression management research by examining whether impression management tactics and/or s–s g matter in predicting performance evaluations. In particular, this study uses the Dominance-based Rough Set Approach (DRSA) rather than traditional statistical methods to formulate employee “if–then” decision rules.

Organizational behaviour or human resource management researchers often use regression analysis or structural equation models (SEMs) to test the relationships between variables based on some assumptions, such that the assumed explanation variables should be independent (called independent variables) and not reflect the complexities of the real world. The major problem with their studies replying on predetermined or fitting model measurements is that they cannot identify what subsets of variables (e.g., attributes, items) critically influence the decision variable. DRSA can be considered applicable and elaborate a mechanism whereby employees effectively engage in various impression management tactics and/or s–s g to achieve high job performance ratings while avoiding low ones. The essence of DRSA can be simply described by classes of dominance relationships and can relax traditional assumptions/hypotheses. A set of “if conditions, then decision” can eliminate dispensable items/attributes without affecting outcomes and combine all antecedents to maximise job performance ratings. In addition, the decision rules developed by DRSA are directly translated into the path-dependent flow network graph to infer the decision path and parameters between impression management tactics, s–s g and job performance ratings and may relax traditional assumptions/hypotheses. Therefore, employee decision rules are formulated in natural language combining flow network graphs, which is also easier to understand for decision-makers than traditional statistics and multivariate analysis approaches, such as SEMs. Therefore, the major purpose of this study is to better understand the possible rules of specific employee social skills and job performance, by using several items related to latent variables conditional on the inherent characteristics of the original data. We believe that DRSA hybrid flow network graphs provide greater insight for employee behavioural decisions and facilitate organisations development of human management strategy.

The reminder of this paper is organised as follows. Section 2 reviews the theoretical background. Section 3 then introduces the basic concepts of the Dominance-based Rough Set Approach (DRSA) and flow network graphs. Subsequently, an empirical sample from Taiwan is used to demonstrate the proposed method in Section 4. The results are presented in Section 5. Then, in Section 6, discussions are presented. Finally, Section 7 presents conclusions.

Section snippets

Theoretical background

This study examines the relationships between impression management tactics, s–s g and job performance based on the following perspectives or theories.

The basic concepts of DRSA

Both the Classical Rough Set Approach (CRSA) and the Dominance-based Rough Set Approach (DRSA) are valuable mathematical tools for addressing vagueness and uncertainty. DRSA, which extends from CRSA for multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA), can address classification problems that CRSA has restricted to preference-ordered decision classes. This method is based on the indiscernibility relation by a dominance relation in the rough approximation of decision classes. The basic concepts of DRSA

An empirical case

To demonstrate the effectiveness of DRSA, this section presents an empirical sample. The gathered data were obtained via questionnaires administered to a matching sample of supervisor–subordinate dyads in Taiwanese companies.

Results

To ensure the construct validity of the major variables, this study uses Lisrel software 8.7 to perform confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs). These variables are assessed for convergent and discriminant validity. Furthermore, hierarchical cluster analysis is performed to classify into three clusters based on supervisor-rated subordinate performance. JAMM software [44] is used to infer employee decision rules and models linking antecedents to supervisor-rated employee performance. Finally,

Discussions and contribution

Using the DRSA and flow network graphs, this study extends prior impression management research by investigating the boundary conditions, such as the relationship between the use of impression management tactics and/or supervisor–subordinate guanxi by employees in pursuit of supervisor-rated job performance in Chinese cultural contexts. DRSA is used to model employee preference for performance ratings and extract hidden decision rules from the initial information. The result of DRSA is a set of

Conclusions

In spite of the limitations of our research, our findings provide new insights into the relationships between impression management tactics, s–s g and performance ratings. We illustrate the usage of the DRSA as operational tools that also can be used for predicting employee behaviour decisions in organisations. Furthermore, the network flow graph is used to explore and discover the path dependences of decision rules, which can help managers more easily understand how employees cultivate social

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