Social Desirability Response Effects on the Task and Relationship Conflict Associations: Latent-variable Structural Equation Approaches

Abstract

Social desirability bias is the tendency of individuals to report an answer in a way that he or she believes is socially acceptable. Respondents are likely to overestimate the importance to them of socially desirable characteristics and to underestimate the importance of less socially desirable ones. Social desirability bias is known as one of the main sources of method variance which refers to variance attributable to the measurement method rather than the construct of interest. Social desirability bias continues to be the key challenge in measuring conflict-related instruments. Using two latent-variable structural equation approaches, this study examines the effects of a social desirability response bias on the task and relationship conflict associations. Findings from a sample of 58 project teams consisting of 279 college students revealed that social desirability was significantly related to both self reported task conflict and relationship conflict measures, but social desirability effects did not account for a significant amount of the shared variance between task and relationship conflict constructs. The theoretical and practical implications of this study are also discussed.