Hold Your Horses: Negative Anticipatory Impression Management and its Motivations

Abstract

An emergent stream of research shows that managers engage in various impression management strategies to manage external perceptions by placing their firms in the best possible light. Drawing from this work, we develop theory around when and why managers may choose to engage in a novel form of preemptive impression management—negative anticipatory impression management (NAIM)—to recalibrate stakeholder expectations. Specifically, we posit that managers use actions and communications that deliberately convey pessimism to reduce the liability of inflated expectations. We then propose two factors—media coverage and the manager’s regulatory focus—that act as moderators. This underscores how managers use negative information to their advantage and further grounds the relevance of executive personality in impression management decision-making.