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The purpose of this study is to look at the structure of the interactions between the board of directors’ chairman qualities such as chairman independence, tenure, ethnicity, age- and impression management (IM).

The research population consists of non-financial Malaysian companies listed on Bursa Malaysia’s Main Market, using data gathered via annual reports and DataStream. The study relies on the ordinary least square regression to test the direct relationships between the directors’ chairman characteristics and IM. Moreover, robustness and sensitivity tests were used to examine the effectiveness of chairman characteristics with IM. Furthermore, the results rely on the FGLS regression as an additional test. The study found that chairman independence, chairman ethnicity and chairman age have a significant impact on IM.

The results reveal that chairman independence has a negative association with qualitative IM (IMSC1). Moreover, chairman ethnicity has a positively significant relationship with qualitative IM (IMSC1) and quantitative IM (IMSC2). Also, the effectiveness of chairman characteristics has a negative and significant association with IMSC1.

The primary goal of this paper is to fill a gap in the literature and to open up opportunities for more in-depth research on the subject. So far, there has been no research into the impact of the board chairman’s (BC) personality on IM. This study serves as a warning to policymakers, businesses and their stakeholders, as well as researchers, about the importance of BC characteristics, which may impede the effectiveness of corporate governance mechanisms. The paper provides a framework for investigating these characteristics in the context of IM.