The professor of management and co-authors found that the political skill dimension of perceived insincerity influences managerial ratings of performance and promotability.
Matthew Valle, the Martha and Spencer Love Professor of Business, recently published his research on political skill in the Journal of Organization and Human Behavior.
“Does perceived insincerity influence managerial ratings of performance and promotability?” was written with co-authors K. Michele Kacmar of Texas State University and Martha Andrews of the University of North Carolina at Wilmington. The team found that supervisor perceptions that subordinates were insincere in their influence attempts negatively affected supervisor ratings of subordinate performance and promotion potential.
From the article: “There are several strengths of this study. One strength is that the current study tested a major theoretical relationship in the Ferris et al. (2007) political skill framework, namely the link between perceived or apparent sincerity and influence outcomes. Researchers have often suggested that influence attempts are only successful if the supervisor perceives the subordinate’s influence to be genuine (Liden & Mitchell, 1988; Schlenker, 2012); we found that insincerity attenuated the positive relationship between supervisor liking and subsequent subordinate performance ratings, and between supervisor similarity and influence and evaluations of promotability. This focus on insincerity was long overdue. Our analyses used HLM (Hierarchical Linear Modeling) to address the nesting factor in our data, and multiple models were tested using LISREL 9.1 to ensure that the study independent and dependent variables discriminated from one another. We used multiple supervisor ratings of outcomes (performance appraisal and promotability ratings) that are critical to potential career progression.
“Subjective bias is inherent in performance ratings and promotion decisions in organizations. These findings align with social identity theory (Schlenker, 1980; 2012) in that those who fail at effectively creating desirable identities receive less favorable outcomes than those who are effective. Specifically, those who appear authentic and sincere in their self-presentations received higher ratings while those perceived as insincere received lower ratings. It could be that insincerity is closely related to career derailment in addition to recently identified traits including defensiveness, rigidity, and hostility (Feruzan, Campbell, McCartney, & Gooding, 2013). Since the supervisor is usually the gatekeeper for future advancement, subordinates need to understand how sincerity, or a perceived lack of sincerity, can affect their career prospects in the short and long term.”