We Would Like To Be Liked – Strategies Used To Control The Impression Others Form Of Us

In the ‘Power and Politics’ chapters of Organizational Behaviour textbooks we often find a section on Impression Management (IM). This term means that people tend to influence how other people perceive them. This research field has been at the centre of interest since the 1980s. Researchers first defined the term, then explained the different forms, tactics and strategies of IM, and also developed measurement tools, which can be used to evaluate it. Its impact and connection with other behaviour variables has also been studied. In this article we will present a smaller part of our research in which we analyse the connection between Dark Triad personality factors, the perception of ethical leadership and the impression of management tactics used by university students. The research was done in the framework of an Organizational Behaviour course at the University of Debrecen’s Faculty of Economics and Business. Students were asked to fill in a questionnaire. Feedback was given to them on how to interpret the results, in order to improve their self-awareness. Then the anonymous questionnaires were collected for research purposes. Participation in the research was voluntary. In the analysis we used basic statistical methods to compare the popularity of the 22 different IM behaviours. It is possible to divide the 22 items of the questionnaire into five well differentiated IM tactics. We calculated these figures and measured if there are significant differences between IM tactics preferred by men and by women, between respondents with and without work experience and between groups of students studying in different majors. We also compared our research results with one of our previous findings, and with figures available in the international literature. The most frequently used IM tactic in our sample was ingratiation. We found a significant difference between male and female respondents in the use of self-promotion and intimidation tactics. Comparing our research result to one of our previous studies (Ujhelyi and Barizsné, 2018), we found significant differences between Hungarian and Chinese students in the use of all IM tactics, and we also obtained similar results when we compared our findings with a sample from the USA analysed by Bolino and Turnley (1999).