Testing the Level of Social Desirability During Job Interview on White-Collar Profession.

Marek Preiss,David Krámský,Tereza Mejzlíková,Adéla Rudá,Jindra Pitáková

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2015.01886

Abstract

Social desirability as a tendency to present oneself in a better light rather than in a truthful manner is common feature presented during job interviews. Previous studies mainly focused on blue-collar professions and therefore authors researched contrary set of white-collar professions in three sub-studies with four different participant groups (legal professions; police officers; controls and university students influenced by scenarios; overall N = 636). It was hypothesized that candidates for legal profession would show similar tendency toward social desirability, when compared with controls. Furthermore, police officers were hypothesized to show similar levels of social desirability as legal professions. Lastly, participants in the instruction manipulation condition were hypothesized to show increased levels of social desirability in tender situation as compared to the honest situation. All groups were tested with balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding (BIDR, Paulhus, 1984). Statistical analyses revealed statistically significant differences for both subscales of BIDR when comparing legal professions and control group. Similarly, increased levels of social desirability were detected in police officer candidates as well as in university students in the tender situation compared with students in the honest situation. The overall results indicated that it is typical for white-collar candidates to adapt to the testing situation and it cannot be expected to see different behavior from legal profession candidates as was originally expected.

Highlights

Social desirability refers to a tendency to respond to self-report items in a way that makes the respondent look good, rather than to respond in an accurate and truthful manner (Holtgraves, 2004)
The present study explored, whether people, who attended university and spent large amount of time preparing for their profession in justice, have a tendency toward distorted style of responding during the last stage of the selection process
Similar results were observed for impression management, where legal profession candidates scored significantly higher than their matched controls (t = 6.683, df = 110, p < 0.001)

Summary

Introduction

Social desirability refers to a tendency to respond to self-report items in a way that makes the respondent look good, rather than to respond in an accurate and truthful manner (Holtgraves, 2004). It is an important and substantive trait, which relates to a range of responses and behaviors in research, as well as, in the real world (Fleming, 2012). Since blue-collar professions, as well as, professions with low qualifications have been studied excessively (Ones et al, 1993), we chose legal professions requiring high qualifications – in particular judges, public prosecutors and executors, for this study. For judges and public prosecutors to be able to fulfill all these rules they need to be mature individuals with high moral standards and in a certain sense sometimes be even brave (Vujtech et al, 2002)

Methods

Results

Conclusion