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The Impact of Social Desirability on Employee Responses to Work‐oriented Surveys: Findings in an Asian Context
Author(s) -
Campbell Donald J.,
Campbell Kathleen M.,
Goh CheaSuan
Publication year - 1999
Publication title -
asia pacific journal of human resources
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.825
H-Index - 33
eISSN - 1744-7941
pISSN - 1038-4111
DOI - 10.1177/103841119903700304
Subject(s) - psychology , moderation , social desirability bias , presentation (obstetrics) , social psychology , performance appraisal , social desirability , context (archaeology) , job satisfaction , applied psychology , management , medicine , paleontology , biology , economics , radiology
This study examined the impact of social desirability on the survey responses of 271 white‐collar employees working in nine Singaporean firms. The research probed for three types of effects (i.e., spurious correlations; moderator effects; and suppression) within three kinds of questionnaire items: neutral self‐presentation items (e.g., assessing the general usefulness of performance appraisal); moderate self‐presentation items (e.g., reporting one's satisfaction with the last performance appraisal); and high self‐presentation items (e.g., assessing one's relationship with the supervisor). Results indicated that social desirability, as expected, manifested itself primarily within the moderate and high self‐presentation items. Impact took the form of moderating relationships between other variables. Discussion centres on the practical implications of these findings, and on the possibility that social desirability may be less troublesome than originally anticipated.