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The Impact of Social Desirability on Employee Responses to Work-oriented Surveys: Findings in an Asian Context

United States Military Academy, New York

Kathleen M. Campbell

College of St Elizabeth, New Jersey

Chea-Suan Goh

National University of Singapore

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 trou blesome than originally anticipated.

Key Words: social desirability • bias in survey/questionnaire responses • self-presentation

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