ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the nature of impression management in organizational settings, drawing upon and integrating the literatures in both social psychology and organizational behavior. It aims to broaden the study of impression management by focusing on the dynamic interplay between actors and observers in the self-presentational aspects of organizational behavior. To complicate matters, each actor in an encounter is simultaneously a perceiver of the self-presentations of other actors. Work within both social psychology and organizational behavior has examined impression management almost exclusively from the standpoint of the actor who is attempting to convey particular impressions. Although research has tended to examine only one or two dimensions in a particular study, real-world impression management often involves simultaneous attention to a set of diverse dimensions – a self-presentational persona. Some theorists have proposed taxonomies that specify the basic dimensions of impression management and scales have been developed to measure them.
