Does Leaders’ Impression Management Help or Hurt? It Depends on the Perspective of the Follower

Abstract

To contribute to the debate on whether leaders’ use of impression management is helpful or not, we examine the role of follower perceptions. We argue that followers who share a similar perspective as their leader about the value of impression management, as evidenced by their own use of these behaviors, come to identify with their leader and see them as having greater consistency between their words and actions, even though leaders’ impression management likely creates noticeable word-deed misalignments. In turn, the greater word-deed consistency attributed to the leader, also known as behavioral integrity, helps followers perform better. Our empirical test of these ideas confirms our reasoning and includes a multi-source field study with 89 triads of Korean managers, associate managers, and employees, a construct validation study with multi-source data (employees N = 160; manager N = 149), and an experimental study involving 189 American employees. Specifically, we found that leaders' use of impression management positively relates to followers’ attributions of their leaders' behavioral integrity which boosts follower performance but only for those followers who also engage in impression management. We confirm that when both followers and leaders engage in impression management, followers identify with their leader and thus view them as having behavioral integrity. These results demonstrate robustness across different research methodologies, different measures and tactics of impression management, and populations. We discuss the implications of this research to the fields of leadership, impression management and behavioral integrity.