Leadership represents a diverse and dynamic area of study, occupying a vast area in sociological literature. However, the nonprofit sector is somewhat neglected in literature that examines leadership as a performance. Heightened demand for accountability, funding shortages and other challenges in the nonprofit sector have spurred recent trends such as coalition-building and business-like practices. Nonprofit leaders must satisfy multiple internal and external stakeholders with opposing values and expectations. This creates a rich and yet incomplete area in which to study impression management. This thesis employs an interpretivist perspective, specifically utilizing symbolic interactionism to understand how the participants create and maintain impressions. By employing Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical metaphors, this thesis addresses how the participants use symbolic representations of leadership in order to create desired impressions. It also explores the strategies used by the participants in order to present a front of competent leadership during the interviews. Lastly, the research asks the participants to reflect on their impression management activities. To address these questions, 19 leaders were interviewed at 11 different nonprofits in Canada and in Egypt for approximately one hour each, using face-to-face semi-structured interviews. Simple observation was also applied. A combination of purposive, snowball and convenience sampling was used to select the organizations. iv The research offers a number of significant findings. First, the manner and appearances of the leaders and the design of their office space provides avenues in which to convey leadership, financial and organizational messages, as well as information about the leaders’ roles and statuses. For example, visual cues may be used to express their participative approach to leadership, convey organizational frugality or success and create a corporate culture. Second, the participants commonly self-identified as benevolent and humble “servant leaders” by attempting to appear as mentors. They downplayed their authority and claimed to integrate staff feedback into the organization. They also claimed to employ a benevolent form of discipline that focuses on learning. When discussing mistakes, the participants claimed to respond in an ideal way, by apologizing and learning from their errors. However, they claimed to, at times, act authoritatively and convey “professionalism.” The leaders displayed their authority during the course of the interview and laid claim to qualifications that made them especially suited for the job. These kinds of inconsistencies suggest that impression management is not static or flawless, but rather a series of performances fraught with contradiction and tension. Third, about half of the participants admitted to consciously changing their behaviour, language and appearances in situations in order to build trust with stakeholders. This involves at times appearing “professional” while at other times self-humbling in order to build a shared-identity with others. The participants struggle to appear sincere, but recognize that their impressions are sometimes met with suspicion. There are limitations to the sampling technique and research design. A larger sample that interviewed a group of leaders from one region would be preferable to this small, cross-national one. In this thesis it is impossible to know whether the participants’ claims are warranted. Longitudinal participant observation would enable the researcher to see inconsistencies and also to understand how others interpret the leaders’ impression management attempts. However, the research has many benefits; in addition to contributing to the literature and providing examples of Goffman’s dramaturgical metaphors in the context of nonprofit leadership, this thesis may assist leaders in their goals. This thesis could lead to increased self-reflexivity or sharing of impression management techniques and could potentially assist nonprofit leaders with their tenuous missions.

This study tries to reverse the direction of previous impression management studies from an employee-centric perspective to supervisor-centric perspective. By conducting supervisor¡¦s impression management as independent variables, employee¡¦s loyalty to supervisor as dependent variables, employee¡¦s social desirable response as controlling variables, and employee¡¦s positive reactions toward supervisor as a mediating role, to discuss the relationship among supervisor¡¦s impression management, employee¡¦s positive reactions and loyalty to supervisor. This research collected data from dyad questionnaires including 219 subordinates with 47 leaders in Taiwanese bank industry, and further used hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) to examine the hypotheses. Result showed that supervisor¡¦s impression management has positive effect on employee¡¦s positive reactions and loyalty to supervisor, and employee¡¦s positive reactions toward supervisor also has significant influence on employee¡¦s loyalty to supervisor. Moreover, employee¡¦s positive reactions toward supervisor will mediate the relationship between supervisor¡¦s impression management and employee¡¦s loyalty to supervisor. This study accordingly raised some suggestions for further research and practitioners.

When an individual experienced that the assumptions are different with the ones when he/she made decisions, and if the actual or imaginational current situations might be better given the information then, a kind of negative emotion named ¡§regret¡¨ emerges. Previous studies found that regret played similar roles in terms of satisfaction, repurchase behavior and intention of complain: regret lowers the satisfaction and repurchase behavior, and indirectly affects the intention of complain through low satisfaction. However, different results are found in the realm of willingness of word-of-mouth communications. Thus, this research combines the work of Zeelenberg & Pieters (2004a) and daily observations for the sake of discussing whether impression management factors causes consumers not to conduct negative word-of-mouth communications albeit regretting their previous decisions ¡V or even carry out positive word-of-mouth communications in extreme cases. The study served scenario design as the main method. Experiment 1 was used in determining the relation between subjects¡¦ word-of-mouth communication behaviorsand their level of regret. The decision category ¡§switch and maintain¡¨ is an indicatorof the subjects¡¦ level of regret. The results indicate that when subjects perceive¡§higher level of regret if experienced¡¨ (i.e. the decision category of switch), theywould possess significantly higher level of effect in word-of-mouth communications then subjects in the other category. The thesis added impression management in experiment 2, they are ¡udependence¡vand¡uself-monitoring¡v, in order to test whether would subjects be affected due to impression management behaviors in terms of the willingness to conduct negative word-of-mouth communications. The results indicate that whether the decision categories or level of experienced regret are served as the measurement of emotions, ¡§level of dependent¡¨ and ¡§level of self-monitoring¡¨ play significant harmonizing roles in communicating negative word-of-mouth information. Significant decrease of such willingness is found in the category of high level of dependent.

Author: Jonathan Wanér Hedberg Title: Angående Individualismen – Facebook: Individualistens Kollektiv Year: 2014/2015 Abstract: This essay seeks to understand how the expression of individualism can be seen in different ways in people’s use of the social network Facebook. Ten interviews with Facebook users have been performed. The analysis of these has been able to illustrate how Facebook users through Erving Goffman´s impression management prepares and presents their individualism to a collective, i. e. the users Facebook friends. The Informants' had a common view of how social ideals are published on Facebook by the users. The informants' description of ideals was in terms of individualistic performances; such as their own physical workout, bread making, or similar self-performed activities. Analysis also demonstrates that the Facebook feature the “like button” can be used as the collective confirmation of the Facebook users presented individualism. This essay is also an attempt to explain how Facebook users enters their own individualized time zones on Facebook; being able to control the lives of friends on Facebook via a time that suits the users themselves; i. e. their own individualized time. Finally this essay tries to argue how people use Facebook to identify specific material, published by friends, which they use as a reflexivity of the self, as Anthony Giddens calls it. The informants describe how they use material, published by others, on Facebook to reflect on their own lives and identities; sometimes this resulted in a related action by those who performed the reflection.

Risk assessments for offenders often combine past records with current clinical findings from observations, interviews, and test data. Conclusions based on these risk assessments are highly consequential, sometimes resulting in increased criminal sentences or prolonged hospitalization. Offenders are therefore motivated to intentionally minimize their risk scores. Intentional minimization is especially likely to occur in offenders with high psychopathic traits because goal-directed deception is reflected in many of the core traits of the disorder, such as manipulativeness, glibness, and superficial charm. However, this connection appears to be based on the conceptual understanding of psychopathy, and it has rarely been examined empirically for either frequency or success. The current study examined the connection between psychopathic traits and the intentional minimization of risk factors using a sentenced jail sample. In general, offenders were able to effectively minimize risk on the HCR-20 and SAQ, while the PICTS, as a measure of cognitive styles, was more resistant to such minimization. Psychopathic traits, especially high interpersonal facet scores, led to greater minimization using a repeated measure, simulation design. Important differences in the willingness and ability to use deception were found based on (a) the content of subscales, and (b) the mode of administration (i.e., interview vs. self-report). The important implications of this research are discussed for risk assessment procedures regarding likely areas of deception and its detection. It also informs the growing literature on the connection between psychopathic traits and deception.

Providing performance feedback in a way that leads to improved performance is an integral aspect to the success of an organization. Past research shows the feedback does not always improve employee performance. Characteristics of feedback can direct attention away from improved performance and toward attention to the self. This study examined the impact of characteristics of feedback delivery on individuals’ tendency to use impression management strategies (exemplification, self-promotion, ingratiation, supplication). The results indicate that participants did not use impression management differently when feedback was delivered publicly versus privately. However, participants reported a higher likelihood to use ingratiation and self-promotion strategies after receiving negative than positive feedback. Discussion of results, along with limitations and directions for future research, are discussed.

: Social anxiety can have severe negative consequences for individuals, from lack of crucial social interaction to lower quality of life. A self-presentation theory of social anxiety posits that social anxiety results from outcome expectancies of social interactions (impression efficacy) and how motivated the individual is to create a good impression (impression motivation). There is also a proposed interaction effect, theorizing that as impression efficacy increases, the association between impression motivation and social anxiety weakens. In a lab study (N=125), measures of impression motivation and impression efficacy were measured situationally (e.g., “I believe I will make the impression that I want to achieve”). These measures were collected both prior to a social interaction with a confederate and after, with the belief that another interaction would take place. Conversely, an online survey (N=301) collected the two measures from a dispositional viewpoint (e.g., “In social interactions, other people probably see me as I like them to see me”). Both pre and post interaction moderation analyses in the lab study failed to find a significant interaction effect. However, a significant interaction was found in the online survey data. This inconsistency may point to differences between the variables, depending on whether they are observed from a situational or dispositional perspective. Analysis of this discrepancy could have implications for further understanding the mechanisms of social anxiousness, as well as potential alleviation techniques and/or treatments.

This study uses three case studies to show how authenticity is fabricated in food culture. Conceptualizing food as a cultural product makes possible the analysis of social processes through food. In doing so, food becomes a mirror reflecting the happenings within the broader social world. This study examines three empirical cases to sociologically understand food culture: southern barbeque, Top Chef, and ramps and quinoa. Southern barbeque allows the examination of the role of fabricated authenticity within food culture. Top Chef is evidence of how chefs actively produce distinction to legitimate their position and status within the field. Ramps and quinoa are examples of two ingredients that have been exploited from their original context to become elite and mainstream ingredients without concern for the consequences to the people who relied on them in the quest for the exotic. Together these cases provide examples of how research on the fabrication of authenticity and impression management can be expanded to include food. / Ph. D.

Individuals at the DFW Church publicly confess intensely personal information, such as drug and alcohol addiction, spousal and child abuse, stripping, and sexual abuse. Using communication privacy management theory (CPM), I examined the way individuals at the DFW Church manage their private information, how they make disclosure decisions, and how they manage boundaries around their private information. I interviewed 13 individuals who participated in public confession, and coded their responses to identify the common themes and tactics for making disclosure decisions. Through this process, I pioneer the application of CPM to examine public disclosure events, rather than dyadic or small group disclosures. I also expand our current understanding of motivations for disclosure; rather than focusing on selfish or therapeutic motivations, participants want to encourage others through their disclosure. In terms of boundary management, individuals at the DFW Church believe that God owns part, or all, of their information; thus, disclosing their pasts is "not about them." Participants construct a new identity through their testimony narrative, effectively putting the old person in the past and presenting a new, Christian identity to the church body for group approval. In this context, confessing a negative behavior becomes a way to build a positive image by showing the drastic reformation that has taken place in that person's life. Lastly, I propose the public disclosure model—which involves boundary testing, audience analysis, and choice of disclosure path—to be tested for use in future research.

Yes / Purpose: Storytelling is claimed to be an effective way of communicating corporate strategy within organisations. However, previous studies have tended to focus holistically on storytelling in organisations rather than investigating how different groups may use and be influenced by stories. This paper addresses these gaps in the literature by investigating how storytelling in internal communication can either support or subvert corporate strategy. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative study was conducted into storytelling in two large companies in the UK energy industry. Data was collected through 70 semi-structured interviews, documentary research, and observation research. Impression management theory was used to analyse how stories supported or subverted corporate strategy. Findings: Storytelling by employees in the corporate and customer service areas of the organisations showed the greatest support for corporate strategy. There was more subversive storytelling in the operational areas, particularly by lower level employees. Stories subverted corporate strategy by recounting incidents and encouraging behaviour that contradicted the organisation’s vision/goals and values. Originality/value: The study shows the important contribution of employees to the collective sensemaking process in organisations, by narrating supportive or subversive stories. Engaging employees in storytelling can enhance support for corporate strategy, however managers should also see subversive stories as an opportunity to identify and address problems in the organisation.