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Extraverts Engage in More Interpersonal Citizenship When Motivated to Impression Manage: Getting Along to Get Ahead?

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Journal of Management

Published online on

Abstract

Extraversion has exhibited inconsistent relationships with employees’ interpersonal citizenship. Across three studies, we integrate literature on personality with impression management and socioanalytic theories to propose that employees’ impression management motives act as a contingency, strengthening the relationship between extraversion and interpersonal citizenship. First, in Studies 1 and 2, across two settings (field and university) and two designs (nonexperimental and experimental), we confirm that extraverted individuals engage in citizenship to a greater extent when they are also either predisposed (Study 1) or cued (Study 2) to manage others’ impressions. In Study 3, we extend these findings by using a conditional mediation process model to develop and test the hypothesis that an individual’s strategy to get along serves as an explanatory mechanism to the interactive effect of extraversion and impression management motives on interpersonal citizenship. Overall, our results suggest that the prediction of interpersonal citizenship can be improved when considering the conjoint influence of employees’ extraversion and impression management motives.