Impostor phenomenon and career preparatory activities: testing ego depletion as mediator and gender as moderator

Despite the well-established findings regarding the negative effect of impostor phenomenon (IP) on individuals’ career development, we know little about its underlying mechanism. It is also unclear whether IP differentially affects the way men and women manage their careers. Drawn upon ego depletion theory, we explored the relationship among IP, gender, ego depletion, and career preparatory activities via an experiment and a two-wave survey conducted in China. The results showed that the negative relationship between IP and career preparatory activities was mediated by ego depletion. We further found that gender moderated the indirect effect of IP on career preparatory activities via ego depletion, and this effect was stronger for women than men. Based on these new findings, some theoretical and practical implications were discussed.