Abstract:

Impression managers, employees with pronounced incentives to influence their supervisors’ perceptions of them, are ubiquitous in various forms of organizations. However, despite the prevalence of impression managers and their relevance to various management control outcomes, they have been significantly understudied in management accounting research. This paper contributes by examining the impact of impression managers on team performance using proprietary data from a service-providing organization. Our identification strategy relies on this organization’s unique feature of random team assignment, and we make use of its 360-degree evaluation data to construct a novel measure of impression managers. We find that the relationship between the proportion of impression managers on a team and team performance is nonlinear and exhibits an inverted-U shape. Our findings also reveal that impression managers positively influence team performance through obtaining more support, guidance, and work resource from supervisors. At the same time, they negatively influence team performance by impairing trust and impeding coordination among colleagues. Moreover, we show that impression managers are more influential when the need for collaboration and information sharing is high and when managers are less experienced. Taken together, this study has important implications on team composition and team culture as control systems. 

General information:

Attendance to this online seminar is possible by invitation only. Please send an e-mail to secbs-abs@uva.nl if your are interested in attending this seminar.