Strategic-Temporal Framing As Impression Management: Managing Investment Analysts’ Temporal Focus

Abstract

Board independence and firm performance are of utmost importance to investment analysts who play a key role in determining stakeholders’ judgments of a firm. Researchers have paid less attention to impression management tactics used in communicating firm performance to analysts. A key tenet of previous research on impression management is that leaders can rely on uncertainty stemming from information asymmetry to manage targets’ impression of various organizational attributes. However, given the power and the good information access of investment analysts, and the visibility of firm performance, information asymmetry proves less helpful in managing analysts’ impression. The present paper builds on the premise that uncertainty can stem from temporal distance between the evaluation decision and the evaluation subject. It proposes a novel theory of temporal impression management, which involves strategic distorting of impression management targets’ temporal focus. Hypotheses are developed and tested using a hand- collected dataset. It is found that when firms perform better (worse) than expectations, leaders reduce (increase) the attention of investment analysts to the past (future) because positive (negative) events are more discounted under a past (future) focus. Moreover, temporal impression management mediates the relationship between firm performance and analysts’ recommendations, making the stock recommendations more favorable.