The presentation of corporate disclosure may be explained by impression management. Previous studies find the existence of impression management in the corporate information disclosure including the financial information disclosure and the non-financial information disclosure. This paper is going to make a complete literature review on these studies related to impression management.
The concept of impression management has its origin in the social psychology and was originally focused on behavior of individuals. It was first introduced by Goffman in 1959. While, recent years, more and more researches had done to investigate the impression management in the corporate information. Impression management can be viewed as a technique that individuals and organizations adopt as an attempt to control the impression that individuals or organizations [
What’s more, empirical research also investigates in which way that the companies using impression management in their information release. They may apply impression management technics in the narratives and use graphs to translate their information. Research on the nature of narrative reporting has focused on impression management as an explanation for the style and content of narrative reports [
Corporate information is crucial to the investors, governments as well as the publics. It is because of the significant of the corporate information and the impression management technics in corporate information release. This paper will solve several problems. Firstly, this paper is going to make a review on previous studies in impression management related to corporate information release. We want to give the researchers a general idea about impression management studies in corporate information release and draw brief comments on previous studies. Secondly, this paper wants to give appropriate suggestions to the corporate stakeholders such as the firms, investors and the regulators in order to let them fully understand the corporate information disclosure.
Impression management originates from social psychology, which focused on behavior of individuals mainly. Goffman first introduced the concept of impression management as “The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life”, suggesting that individuals have the objective to achieve congruence between their image and the image that is necessary for the desired goals [
Through the review of the above literatures, we can see that the impression management gained lots of attentions and many scholars made their own understanding about the impression management. There is no standard definition on the impression management. Generally speaking, we can know that the impression management is a process or a tool to help companies fill the gap between the real situation and the desired status. Researches are also find out the impression management technique used in the corporate and try to reveal the motivation and the effectiveness of impression management on the corporate information release. They discuss why the companies want to do impression management in their information disclosure? What is the effect of the impression management on the corporate? These studies solve these questions and make us know deep bout the impression management in the corporate field.
As impression management has been widely applied in various disciplines like organizational behavior, sociology, politics and science, it also used in the accounting field [
Prior studies suggest that managers apply self-attributing as one of impression management way in their information disclosure. Weiner noticed that people prefer to attribute success to their own ability and attribute failure to external factors [
Then, there are researches on the intelligibility and readability of the disclosure information. Adelberg presents that there exists some explanatory bias when managers state non-standard information, by examining the intelligibility of statement notes, MD&A and auditor reports [
Financial reports as one of the most important ways of information disclosure drive lots of scholars’ attentions. This stream of academic research is dedicated to study the impression management in financial reports. Scholars find some tables and pictures can be used in impression management to weaken the effect of bad information on users or strengthen the effect of good information. McKinstry found the company of Burton has conveyed company’s image to public through the annual reports with pictures and designs during 1930 to 1994 [
Beattie & Jones shows that over 80% of the top largest listed in U.K and over 92% greatest listed companies in US use graphs in their financial release. These graphs are eye-catching. What’s more they are been viewed as part of the impression management methodology [
By reviewing these articles, we can tell that the previous studies investigate the impression management in financial information disclosure from different aspects. They find that the self-attributing can be one of the reasons that why managers using impression management techniques. Besides, they also exam the intelligibility and readability of the disclosure information. They find that companies using different narratives and graphs to influence the readability of the information they provided to the stakeholders. All these research from different perspectives verify the existence of impression management in the financial information release.
Non-financial information disclosure belongs to another aspect of corporate information disclosure field. Researches has found that impression management methodology is applied in the non-financial information dis-closure.
Cesario et al., suggest when a message recipient “feels right” from regulatory fit, this subjective experience transfers to the persuasion context and serve as information for relevant evaluations, including perceived message persuasiveness and options of the topic. That is to say, the better message recipients feel, the more they will agree on the message. Firms disclose more quantitative information in their CSR reports may bring two kinds of impression to readers; one kind is that firms attach importance to social responsibility practice that takes more inputs, and firms spend more time searching statistic data used to launch CSR reports, not just meeting the demands of regulators or stakeholders. The other kind is that firms are more sincere and do not confuse information by disclosing more qualitative description [
Rämö suggested pictures can enhance the comprehension of reports, especially CSR reports. When pictures and printed words are presented together, it is the picture which readily elicits the first response, because pictures impact the viewer directly without the need for translation within mind. Furthermore, Rämö also thinks reports with incongruent visuals are likely to be distracting and the readers will be able to recall fewer points from the message. Based on above opinions, pictures not only can convey information, but also can make readers focus on some certain information [
From now on we can see that there has been lots of researches about impression management done related to the non-financial information disclosure. Due to the characteristic of non-financial information, scholars find the influence of impression management on the stakeholders. They also find the way how they using impression management in non-financial information disclosure. By reviewing these studies, we can know that when company perform good, they prefer using more quantitative information to gain a good evaluation from the readers. Besides, graphs is another method used by companies to making impression management in their information disclosure.
Our study makes a literature reviews on the impression management in the corporate disclosure. This paper makes a review form the two aspects: Impression management in the financial information disclosure and impression management in the non-financial information aspect. We find that the previous studies based on the psychology theory and using the self-severing attribution to discuss the corporate behaviors on impression management. Academic research investigates the reasons of why companies doing impression management in information disclosure. What’s more, they find that managers apply impression management through the languages they used in narratives and the graphs they used in information release. They also find that the impression management in the corporate information release deed has impact on the readers’ psychology. The impression management in the corporate information disclosure has impact on the investors’ evaluation on the corporate performance and also has effect on the corporate stock price. All these studies have showed that the impression management gains more and more attentions from both the scholars and the stakeholders.
Furthermore, there are several suggestions for the stakeholders. Due to the significance of the financial information, thus, the investors should be more cautions on the corporate financial information release. They should pay attention to the language or the words that the managers used in order to make right investment decisions. As for regulator, they should make more specific regulations or guidelines on the non-financial information disclosure such as more detailed regulations on the corporate social responsibility reports. As for the firm itself, firm should apply accurate information and add more quantitative information to enhance quality and readability of reports. Thus, the stakeholders can draw an accurate evaluation on the corporation’s performance.
Based on the previous studies which investigate the impression management in corporate information disclosure, we start our research on reviewing these studies in order to draw a general idea about impression management on corporate information disclosure. Although we make literature review on the current researches and make our suggestions, some limitations exist: firstly, we only review the impression management related to the corporate information disclosure and may have some omits related to other aspect of corporate behaviors. Secondly, we review the impression management on corporate information release which has published on the website that we can see. Due to the accessibility, there may be some articles we did not include in this paper. Third, Impression management is a broad concept and the impression management mechanism is sophisticated as well, so there is more space for scholars to investigate.
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