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Tacticality, Authenticity, or Both? The Ethical Paradox of Actor Ingratiation and Target Trust Reactions

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Abstract

Ingratiation is an impression management strategy whereby actors try to curry favor with targets, and is one of the more pervasive social activities in a workplace. An assumption in the literature is that a target’s awareness of the tactical purposes behind ingratiation (e.g., “he merely wants a raise”) is an ethical concern which triggers suspicions of ulterior motives and casts the actor as distrustful. However, this assumption fails to consider alternative explanations in that ingratiation may also be perceived as occurring for authentic purposes (e.g., “he really wants to be liked”). This alternative view may cause targets to cast the actor differently, and thus presents an intriguing ethical paradox where actors could be recognized by targets as trustful, distrustful, or some level in-between. This research draws on behavioral ethics and attributional models to investigate supervisor trust of employees who engage in ingratiation. We report two studies that examine perceived tactical ingratiation, perceived authentic ingratiation, and their interaction as predictors of supervisor trust using multisource data from two field samples. Across the two studies, we find positive interactions between tactical and authentic ingratiation as predictors of trust and trustworthiness. Study 2 also shows that combined tactical and authentic ingratiation predicts the trustworthiness dimensions of benevolence and integrity, but not ability. The results suggest that ingratiation is portrayed somewhat bleaker than necessary in the literature, and that when actors engage in tactical ingratiation that is also deemed authentic, targets respond with less concern than the literature would suggest.

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Notes

  1. The present study focused on the targets’ perceptions of ingratiation and trust. However, as a supplement to this main analysis we also included employee responses as a way to capture the actors’ perspective, as impression management scholars have noted the importance of both views (Bolino et al. 2016; Foulk and Long 2016; Long et al. 2015). Employees had an average age of 33.8 years (SD = 12.1) and were 46.5% male. They had worked for their organizations for an average of 3.3 years (SD = 0.83) and for their supervisors an average of 3.1 years (SD = 0.92). Employees identified their ethnicity as 74.1% Caucasian, 7.0% Asian/Pacific islander, 9.6% African American, 5.7% Hispanic, 0.4% Native American, and 3.1% Other.

  2. As shown in Table 2, the employee self-reported variables moderately correlated with the supervisor-perceived counterpart variables. As shown in Table 3, the results also supported Hypotheses 1 and 2; in Step 1 tacticality was negatively linked to perceived trust (β = − .11, t = − 3.61, p = 0.00), and authenticity was positively linked to perceived trust (β = 0.25, t = 7.18, p = 0.00). However, the interaction in Step 2 was not significant, and Hypothesis 3 was not supported. In contrast to target perceptions of authenticity, employee self-reports of authenticity do not reduce the negative impact of tacticality on perceived trust. In other words, authenticity matters most in the eye of target, and not the actor, when it comes to targets judging trust. These findings can be useful to scholars interested in the actor’s view of ingratiation and trust.

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    David M. Long

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Long, D.M. Tacticality, Authenticity, or Both? The Ethical Paradox of Actor Ingratiation and Target Trust Reactions. J Bus Ethics 168, 847–860 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10551-019-04251-3

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