LEAP - R2 (Leadership Potential Assessment - 2nd Revision) Sample Report

What is Impression Management?

Impression Management assesses the degree to which results on a test are distorted, biased, or manipulated. It is added to assessments like this one in order to call attention to suspicious test-taking behavior. When taking aptitude or personality tests, some people will try to present themselves in a better light, especially if the stakes are high, such as when they are applying for a job. The person may deliberately or subconsciously choose to underreport negative behaviors or overreport positive ones, or he or she may select responses that he or she believes other people will give under the same circumstances. Other names for concepts similar to Impression Management (though not necessarily identical) include Social Desirability, Gaming the Test, Faking, Faking Good, Distortion, Lying, and Self-deception.

How is Impression Management assessed?

A test-taker's answers on the Impression Management questions are compared to the responses of the general population who also took this assessment. When someone selects socially desirable responses that are rarely endorsed by other people, there is reason to believe that a self-presentation bias is at play.

It is important to keep in mind that a socially desirable response to any single Impression Management question could actually be the truth, in that the person is actually as good or as skilled as he or she is claiming to be. However, if most or all the questions on the scale follow a socially desirable pattern, it is unlikely that the person is being truthful, though not entirely impossible.

How should an Impression Management score be interpreted?

The information offered by an Impression Management scale is meant as a cautionary note, an indication to pay careful attention to the test-taker's results and to his or her responses in an interview. A high probability of social desirability casts doubt on a person's results, but this doesn't mean that he or she should automatically be dismissed solely based on that. The hiring manager should view this as a sign that they need to be particularly thorough when interviewing the candidate, paying special attention to the skills and traits a person claims to have and probing in the interview to see if the person is really as good as he or she claims to be. For additional tools that can help with the hiring process, we suggest that you use the interview questions module available in ARCH Profile, which provides questions that are tailored to a test-taker's results and specifically designed to probe deeper.

There is one caveat: any Impression Management scale can produce a false negative. People who are familiar with psychometrics may be able to detect Impression Management questions and achieve a low score. A false positive is also possible, in which a person is actually as wonderful and honest as he or she claims to be. However, both of these conditions are quite rare.

How did this test-taker perform on Impression Management?

The probability that Sample's responses were influenced by social desirability bias is low.

This means that while he picked a few responses that are associated with "faking good," it is likely that his results on the scales are a fairly accurate reflection of how he conducts himself in real life. It is always a good idea to validate that by asking probing interview questions in which you solicit concrete examples of situations when he displayed certain positive characteristics or competently managed challenging circumstances.