Effect of structured and unstructured interviews on impression management.

Abstract

An interview is the most commonly used device to gather information between an interviewer and an applicant. The purpose ofthis study was to examine the effect of structured and unstructured interviews on impression management. The researcher in this study discussed structured interviews, unstructured interviews, and impression management. Four interviews were videotaped. A pilot test was performed on the videotape. A lab experiment was conducted on 108 male and female participants who watched the videotaped interviews which displayed scenarios with impression management and without impression management. The participants at the time were working on their Business and Psychology degrees. SPSS software was used to analyze the data. The results revealed that the applicant who used impression management in the unstructured interview was rated higher than the applicant who did not. The results also showed that raters prefer using the structured interview more than the unstructured interview when interviewing applicants.