ABSTRACT
This chapter presents an overview of the self-enhancement motive, noting some of the many phenomena to which it has been linked as well as touching on the debate over whether self-enhancement is good or bad. It discusses how self-enhancement has been used in industrial-organizational/organizational behavior (IO/OB) research, including how it has typically been assessed. The chapter focuses on contributions of IO/OB research to the self-enhancement literature. It considers future research directions for self-enhancement in IO/OB research. Research has suggested different taxonomies to provide some semblance of order to self-enhancement strategies that comprise the self-zoo. Defensiveness represents cognitive and behavioral strategies that protect the self from threats and thus primarily represents strategies that serve the self-protection motive. Positivity embracement represents a set of cognitive and behavioral strategies serving the self-enhancement motive that deal with the solicitation and interpretation of positive feedback. As few employees are perfect, receiving threatening feedback is part and parcel of most performance evaluation systems.
