Self‐monitoring personality trait at work: An integrative narrative review and future research directions

• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1002/job.2346
• Date: 01 February 2019
• Published date: 01 February 2019

THE JOB ANNUAL REVIEW

Self‐monitoring personality trait at work: An integrative

narrative review and future research directions

Selin Kudret

1

|Berrin Erdogan

2

|Talya N. Bauer

2

1

Kingston Business School, Kingston

University, London, UK

2

School of Business, Portland State

University, Portland, Oregon

Correspondence

Selin Kudret, Kingston Business School,

Kingston University, London, KT2 7LB, UK.

Email: s.kudret@kingston.ac.uk

Summary

In this narrative review, we provide an overview of the self‐monitoring literature as it

applies to the workplace context. Our starting point to the review is a meta‐analysis of

self‐monitoring literature published in 2002 by Day, Schleicher, Unckless, and Hiller.

After providing an overview of the theoretical basis of self‐monitoring and its

measurement, we present a summary of the broad literature on self‐monitoring to

examine the implications of self‐monitoring for employees and organizations. Basedon

our review, we identify the main outcomes of self‐monitoring as well as findings of the

literature treating self‐monitoring as a moderator. We provide evidence that self‐

monitoring has potential downsides, which would benefit from further investigation.

We conclude our review by identifying importantpotential future research directions.

KEYWORDS

leadership, personality, self‐monitoring, social networks

1|INTRODUCTION

Self‐monitoring refers to an individual's observation, regulation, and

control of his or her expressive behavior and self‐presentation guided

by social and situational cues (Snyder, 1974; Snyder & Gangestad,

1986). In more than four decades following its introduction to the lit-

erature, self‐monitoring emerged as an important and relevant trait in

understanding individual behavior, finding application in fields as

diverse as educational psychology, health psychology, marketing, and

management. Because self‐monitoring captures interpersonal varia-

tion in the degree to which individual behavior reflects interpersonal

cues as opposed to inner affective states, self‐monitoring has been

treated both as a predictor of specific employee behaviors (e.g.,

Tasselli, Kilduff, & Menges, 2015), and as a moderator of the effects

of other traits (Barrick, Parks, & Mount, 2005), contributing to a finer

grained understanding of individual behaviors.

In a meta‐analysis of 136 studies, Day et al. (2002) examined the

relationship between self‐monitoring trait and workplace attitudes and

behaviors, exploring its implications for performance, advancement,

leadership, organizational commitment, and role stress. Their conclu-

sion was that the self‐monitoring trait “has relevance (i.e., validity) in

organizations. Researchers and theorists are encouraged to further

consider how self‐monitoring helps shape who succeeds and leads in

organizations.”(Day et al., 2002, p. 398). Since then, and following a

theory piece by Day and Schleicher (2006) in which they elaborated

on these findings, research on self‐monitoring has gained traction in

relation to work‐related outcomes.

Given that it has been 16 years since the last comprehensive

review, we believe the time has come to take stock of whether the

promise of self‐monitoring trait to shed light on performance, leader-

ship, and other workplace outcomes has been fulfilled and what

avenues of research remain to be pursued. Such a review is timely.

For example, as Figure 1 shows, over 75% of the literature in this area

have been published after the meta‐analysis of Day et al. (2002).

Therefore, our first intended contribution is to provide a systematic

and up‐to‐date review of the literature since then, identifying key

themes, summarizing the main findings, while also identifying

understudied areas. Our goal is to integrate and make sense of the

findings and evaluate implications for organizational behavior.

Further, a potentially problematic trend in self‐monitoring

research is that studies have tended to emphasize the benefits of

self‐monitoring although paying relatively little attention to emerging

evidence on the potential dark effects or undesired outcomes. Despite

the predominantly positive view of self‐monitoring in the literature,

evidence also exists on the ways in which this trait has negative or

undesirable outcomes for individuals and organizations. We use the

Received: 30 November 2016 Revised: 7 December 2018 Accepted: 20 December 2018

DOI: 10.1002/job.2346

J Organ Behav. 2019;40:193–208. © 2018 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/job 193

term “dark effects”to refer to potential risks to health, happiness, and

effectiveness of the individual in multiple domains of life, including

one's job and career. For instance, self‐monitoring has been related

to lower levels of consistency between one's attitudes and behaviors

(Allen, Weeks, & Moffitt, 2005; Jawahar, 2001) or the tendency to

make biased decisions (Jawahar & Mattsson, 2005). Thus, a second

contribution is to juxtapose existing evidence relating to its potential

bright and dark effects.

Finally, after reviewing the literature, we focus on key future

research directions. Thus, a third contribution of our review is to high-

light areas that deserve additional research attention. We identify

areas where self‐monitoring is a relevant and strategically important

addition to models of individual behavior, particularly in the areas of

leadership, team dynamics, employee selection, and newcomer adjust-

ment. We also pose questions relating to the nature of self‐monitoring,

which have a bearing on future research designs, including an

increased recognition of the multidimensional nature of self‐

monitoring. Our goal is to formulate research directions involving fuller

integration of self‐monitoring into models of workplace behavior.

Our starting point was to conduct a joint keyword search of

PsycINFO database using the search terms “self‐monitoring”and “per-

sonality”without specifying a starting date, which revealed 1,334

articles published as of November 1, 2018. We further restricted the

search parameters to between 2000 to our search date, yielding 873

articles. Our review focused on studies conducted within work

settings as well as in other disciplines with possible implications for

organizational psychology and behavior. We reviewed articles written

since 2000, with the intent to identify articles which may not have

been published at the time of the most recent meta‐analysis on the

topic (Day et al., 2002). As a result, 761 articles were deemed not

work‐related and a total of 112 articles were identified for inclusion

in our review, 99 of which were empirical papers that became the

corpus of our integrative review. It is worth noting that we do not

aim to present an explicitly chronological history of the self‐

monitoring concept. Instead, we summarize the major findings of the

studies that followed the meta‐analysis of Day et al. (2002) to high-

light what we learned since then, what questions need further

research attention, and how self‐monitoring may be further integrated

into studies within organizational contexts.

2|THE CONCEPTUALIZATION AND

THEORY OF SELF‐MONITORING

Snyder (1974, 1979) was the first to propose, conceptualize, and define

the self‐monitoring personality trait. Self‐monitoring theory is a theory

of expressive control. It examines variations in the extent to which indi-

viduals are willing and able to control their public expressions, and

shape their public appearances. Specifically, self‐monitoring captures

one's willingness and adeptness at modifying their social images in line

with situational demands, and behaving in line with social role expecta-

tions of others. Therefore, a number of researchers have likened the

individuals who are higher on self‐monitoring to chameleons (e.g.,

Bedeian & Day, 2004; Blakely, Andrews, & Fuller, 2003; Kilduff &

Day, 1994), or called them social pragmatists (e.g., Day & Schleicher,

2006; Gangestad & Snyder, 2000), who craft their self‐presentations

to fit the requirements of the situation and context (Snyder, 1979). By

contrast, those lower on self‐monitoring are characterized as reflecting

their authentic, true selves regardless of the context. Expressive behav-

ior of those lower on self‐monitoring is assumed to be rooted in their

motivation to authentically reflect their inner‐selves, emotions, and

dispositions, and to establish their relationships on the basis of earnest-

ness, sincerity, and equal status (Gangestad & Snyder, 2000). Individuals

who are lower on self‐monitoring are therefore portrayed by some as

principled (Day & Kilduff, 2003; Day & Schleicher, 2006).

Gangestad and Snyder (2000) maintained that self‐monitoring is

characterized by a “status enhancement motive,”or a desire to achieve

and enhance status within social structures. There is empirical support

for this argument. For example, in a series of studies, Flynn, Reagans,

Amanatullah, and Ames (2006) showed correlations ranging between

0.25 and 0.31 with need for social status, and supported the hypothesis

that self‐monitoring was related to social status as mediated by per-

ceived generosity. Similarly, Highhouse, Brooks, and Wang (2016)

found a correlation of 0.28 between self‐monitoring and status‐

seeking. Interestingly, even though self‐monitoring is related to status

seeking, its relationship with need for approval follows a different pat-

tern. Specifically, self‐monitoring and need for social approval showed

correlations ranging between −0.21 (Sosik & Dinger, 2007) to 0.09

(Sendjaya, Pekerti, Härtel, Hirst, & Butarbutar, 2016) in organizational

samples. In other words, there seems to be a distinction between seek-

ing approval versus status and standing in relation to self‐monitoring.

By setting forth these assumptions, self‐monitoring theory pro-

poses a boundary condition and offers an answer to a fundamental

dichotomy in psychology: whether behavior is a function of the

individual's personality traits or of the environmental context. Self‐

monitoring theory's answer to this question is that it will depend on

one's self‐monitoring (Gangestad & Snyder, 2000). Because self‐

monitoring captures the degree to which individuals act on social cues,

the behavior of high self‐monitors will be less dependent on personal-

ity, attitudes, or values, and instead be a function of situational cues

that signal desired social image. In contrast, those lower on self‐

monitoring do not necessarily adjust their behaviors according to

environmental cues, which makes their behaviors more of a function

of their personality traits, attitudes, or values.

In a recent conceptual article, Dalal et al. (2014) propose a novel

use of self‐monitoring in the operationalization of the personality

FIGURE 1 Number of publications on self‐monitoring over the years

(based on a literature search in Web of Science™using self‐monitoring

as the search term)

194 KUDRET ET AL.