Too much self‐promotion! How self‐promotion climate relates to employees' supervisor‐focused self‐promotion effectiveness and their work group's performance

Abstract

Self-promotion has largely been researched from an individual perspective. It is thus unclear if this behavior is functional or dysfunctional within a broader social context. The present study offers a contribution in this regard by examining self-promotion within work groups. In particular, we hypothesized that work group self-promotion climate—referring to the shared perception of the occurrence of self-promotion in the work group—moderates the relationships between individuals' supervisor-focused self-promotion and supervisor ratings of both job performance and promotability. More precisely, we expected these relationships to be positive only when self-promotion climate is low. With respect to the entire work group, we further hypothesized that self-promotion climate negatively relates to supervisor-rated work group performance via impaired work group cohesion. We tested these propositions with data from 195 work groups. Multivariate path analysis provided support for our hypothesized model. Taken together, our findings illustrate the important role of self-promotion as a climate construct. In particular, self-promotion climate helps us better understand the role of self-promotion for individuals and work groups.