This study used a laboratory experiment with data collected from 84 undergraduate business students to examine the impact of sex, sex-role identity, sex of experimenter, and quality of information on helpless behavior and performance. Although no sex differences were found, results showed sex-role identity differences in learned helplessness and performance. Specifically, when participants were most helpless, androgynous and undifferentiated participants performed at the highest levels. Less helplessness was also experienced when participants were paired with a male experimenter. Consistent with prior research, males tended to make external attributions for failure while females tended to make internal and stable ones. The practical implications of these findings are considered.

This experimental study used senior university students in a business curriculum to explore the role of impression management as a bias in a performance appraisal setting. Subordinate performance and the gender of both raters and ratees were also included as factors in the study. As expected, findings show that performance is the primary determinant of appraisal scores as a main effect where all evaluation measures were significant at the p < .001 level. Performance also interacted significantly with both the subordinate gender and rater gender variables. Impression management, both as a main effect and in interaction with ratee gender, was also found to influence performance appraisal scores, although to a lesser extent than performance. Defensive impression management tactics, including apologies and excuses, were generally found to have a negative influence on evaluations. The gender variables were only significant when interacting with performance and impression management conditions.