A meta‐analytic review and empirical test of the potential confounding effects of social desirability response sets in organizational behaviour research

Abstract

Recently, several authors have questioned the potential biasing effects of social desirability response sets on the findings reported in organizational behaviour research. This paper reports the results of two studies designed to examine this issue. In the first study, a meta‐analytic review of 33 studies that have examined the relationships between social desirability response sets and organizational behaviour constructs was conducted. The results of this study indicated that social desirability, as traditionally measured in the literature, is significantly (although moderately) correlated with several widely used constructs in organizational behaviour research. The second study was designed to see if the meta‐analytic results would be replicated using a new measure of socially desirable responding. The results from this study indicated that even though a number of the measures commonly used in organizational behaviour research are significantly correlated with Paulhus' (1989) impression management dimension, the majority of these correlations are generally small to moderate in size, and controlling for socially desirable responding had little impact on the nature of the relationships reported. The importance of these findings for those using self‐report questionnaires is then discussed.