Monthly Archives: January 2011

A Lesson I Learned the Hard Way

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Fine. This is my first answer to a prompt on Plinky. It asks me to describe a time when I had learnt a lesson the hard way. I think I have an answer to that.

As a student of business administration, I was interning with a major IT firm in their HR department. I was assisting a manager, also the co-guide through my internship, with the recruitment planning and processes. Over a series of meetings to finalize the recruitment process for the intake of fresh graduates, it was decided by the Head HR that we have a screening test which includes test of mathematical ability, reasoning, and language. The duty of the making at least four different question papers was given to me. I took it, but there were other priority works given too given to me. I finished most of my priority jobs and relaxed in the office, just when the Head HR walked into the office. He greeted, and casually asked what I was doing. Because of the relation I share with him, and the general culture of the organization too, I said ‘nothing’. Then he asked me to hand over the question papers; which I did not make. That moment felt like I had my foot in my mouth. But then, Yes, that is the lesson I learnt the hard way–never say ‘nothing’ when boss wants to know what we are doing, because there is definitely one thing we would have missed, and if we didn’t, then there is one more coming our way.

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Gender in Communication Style

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Some research is a result of institution’s demands on faculty for publishing. And traditionally, some journals referred to research as having numbers in support of statements. I am not here to argue if that is acceptable or not. But one of the studies I read today did not really mean anything by its stated objective. Yet, ironically it presents a summary of research till then, proposes valid problems, and then slips it. I guess that is how most research would be when under publishing pressure.

Mark Talley and Virginia Richmond have studied the relation between psychological gender orientation and communication style. They have concluded that gender orientation should not receive primary attention from the scholars from interpersonal communication, and that communication style measure designed by Norton should not be used until it was further validated. As a scholar, if I were to look at that abstract and conclusion, I am really not keen in finding the inspiration behind such research. And it is the same here!

But let me present snippets from their review of literature, very informative:

A large body of research has indirectly investigated communication styles through examination of sex-role differentiation and has found different styles of communication between males and females. Females have consistently been found to play a respondent, passive, and socio-emotional role in the exchange of information, while males appear to be primarily concerned with independent, dominant, and task roles.

Males’ communicative styles obviously tend to reflect the traditional masculine orientation: males tend to be more dominant in conversation , to argue more in conversation, to be more relaxed while communicating, and to be more dramatic. Females’ communication styles also tend to reflect the traditional feminine orientation: females tend to be more friendly and attentive using increased smiles, positive head nods, and positive reactions during communication, and are more open and animated in the display of feelings and emotions.

I have both good and bad feelings about this study. On the good part, I appreciate the scholarly treatment given to the subject and the criticism for theories on gender orientation and communication style. Especially, knitting the old research in the framework of communication style as laid out by Norton was the most fascinating part of it. On the not so good side, I suspect (rather believe!) that they missed a few links that were in the theory, and came to wrong conclusions (I might be wrong in saying this).

Intellectual Warfare

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Four scholars talking at close to mid night. All of them are from different fields. One of them said about what he was doing as ‘describing what is common sense only more accurately’. In response, another one said, ‘it is more belief than it is rational’. Another one of them had an intelligent test to disprove the theories of the first of them all. The last of them has written this. :)

Marital Communication Style – I

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Bernstein’s research primarily studied the use of language as a function of social class. Social class was an important variable then, and inspired lot more research around it. Hawkins, Weisberg and Ray studied the relationship between social class and marital communication style.

Interesting! Yes, it is, Marital communication style. An issue that most people joke about, laugh about, complain about…such an integral part of our daily communication that it comes as a topic whether we are talking about parents, friends, colleagues and almost anyone to everyone.

In their study, they defined four classes of communication styles depending on the amount of self-disclosure and how open/closed one was to communication. Such classification was supported by theory, so no dispute over that. More than 160 couples (married for over three years was the criteria), from high, middle and low social classes, took part in the study and were interviewed. The interview elicited information about critical incidents in marital life, communicative behaviour expected and received from each other, and also the assumptions they held about what is good communication. The study also involved making the couple participate in a five-minute discussion which would be observed by an outsider, who would, at the end of the session, rate the communication styles of the individuals in the couple. And then data analysis…

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The results were simple and profound. The higher the social class of the couple, the more contactful style was preferred and less conventional style (just imagine this situation, makes me laugh out loud). This means that the demand for open communication and high disclosure is sky high in couples from high social class. And even more funnily, this does not change for the couples from other social classes, except that their demand for such communication tends to be relatively low compared to the higher class. This meant that the communicative demands of individuals in a married couple are all the same irrespective of their social class, but that they are at different levels (may be a good news). Even more interestingly, most of the couples felt they deal with emotional issues in contactful or speculative style (that means every problem is solved on fair grounds, is that true?!). Overall, there seemed to be not much difference between couples from any social class in the way they communicate.

Ha ha…

The lesson is that marriage is a contract that demands intense focus and frequent communication, but most part of it ends in conflict while a little part of it remains secret. Isn’t that so true! This piece of research just confirms it.

Assertiveness as Communication Style

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When Norton described communication style in terms of ten independent sub constructs and communicator image, he did not include assertiveness as a sub construct of communication. Passive, aggressive and assertive is one kind of classification that was prevalent in describing communication styles then. So it was not surprising when he had to answer the critics about why assertiveness was not a part of his conceptualization of communication style.

He had an answer!

His review of literature on assertiveness then revealed that it was generally defined in terms of communicative acts such as refusal of unreasonable requests, initiation of requests, insistence on fair treatment of self, spontaneous expression of one’s feelings, outgoingness and willingness to take the initiative in social situations, and active disagreement. Many scholars studied assertiveness, but there was little effort to precisely present what it had and what it didn’t. This meant that Norton could explain assertiveness as a combination of some of the sub constructs he thought explained communication style.

Subsequently, he studied the communication style and assertiveness of college students. Communication style with the sub constructs as in his model was measured by his questionnaire CSM (communicator style measure), and assertiveness was measured using two different questionnaires, College Self-expression Scale (CSES) and Rathus Assertiveness Schedule (RAS). Each of these scales had their own set of sub constructs. Most of them were unique but some of them were similar. Norton took the data generated by administering these questionnaires and did cluster analysis. It was found that the CSM sub constructs openness and contentious, along with a couple of other traits of being not anxious and not intimidated have described assertiveness.

When assertiveness as a construct was used by scholars with not so much consensus as some of the other sub constructs in CSM, Norton thought it was inappropriate to lay significance and pay attention to it. However, where it was important, the alternative could be to describe assertiveness in terms of other standard variables, like the one in CSM.

Norton’s Communication Style

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Robert Norton’s conception of communication style was inspired by the research of Bales, Bushard and a lot of other scholars from different domains. He also believed that to understand interpersonal communication, one must deal not only with what is communicated, but also with how it is communicated. Communication style was then broadly conceived to mean ‘the way one verbally and paraverbally interacts to signal how literal meaning should be taken, interpreted, filtered, or understood’.

What Norton did was essentially give shape to one of the ideas Watzlawick, Beavin, and Jackson had presented in their work, Pragmatics of human communication—a work that even contemporary scholars find fascinating. They mentioned in their work that the idea of communication style refers to the ‘how’ or process of communication than ‘what’ or content of it. Norton’s conceptualization however came later, and was more firmly grounded in theory.

The belief that lead to the foundation of communication style construct was that, like personality and attitude, the communicative predispositions that any individual holds sufficiently correlate to the extent that it can be generalized. Thus identifying these communicative predispositions was the first task.

In one of the first published series of studies by Norton and his colleagues, communication style was seen to be explained by the momentum, frequency of speech, and dominance of the communicator. The efforts furthered and soon communication style was to be described in terms of ten operational independent variables (sub constructs) and one dependent variable. How communication style has come to be explained by these variables is largely unknown (may be unpublished). But that they might have been a result of Norton’s willingness to present his conceptualization of communication style in grounded theory, which was available for the variables he chose, could be a reasonable argument.

All right! No more suspense. These variables that explained communication style were: animated, attentive, contentious, dramatic, dominant, friendly, open, relaxed, precise, impression-leaving, and lastly communicator image.

Animated: This attribute refers to how nonverbally active a person is as a communicator. A person who actively uses facial expressions and physical gestures is animated. A person whose eyes tend to reflect a great deal of what they are feeling is animated.

Attentive: This attribute refers to how alert a person is as a communicator. An attentive communicator tends to be encouraging to others, listening carefully to what they have to say. Such a person deliberately reacts in such a way that people know they are being listened to.

Contentious: This attribute refers to a person who constantly quarrels and disputes with others. Such a person may be thought of as belligerent and the cause of much interpersonal unrest.

Dramatic: This attribute refers to how verbally alive a person is. A person whose speech tends to be very picturesque is dramatic; a person who frequently exaggerates to emphasize a point is dramatic; a person who vocally acts out what is being communicated is dramatic.

Dominant: This attribute refers to the tendency to come on strong in most social situations. A person who takes charge of things when with others is dominant; a person who generally speaks very frequently in social situations is dominant.

Friendly: This attribute refers to a person who usually demonstrates kindly interest and goodwill toward others. This person is seldom hostile towards others and is usually regarded with high esteem by others.

Open: This attribute refers to how self-disclosing a person is as a communicator. A person who readily reveals personal things or openly expresses feelings and emotions is an open communicator; when other people generally know the person’s emotional state even if the person does not say anything, the person is open.

Relaxed: This attribute refers to how much at ease a communicator appears to be. A person who is not conscious of any nervous mannerisms in his speech is relaxed; a person who is calm and collected when talking is relaxed; a person whose rhythm or flow of speech is not affected by nervousness is relaxed.

Precise: When the precise communicator argues with others, he or she expects that all of the disputants will define their terms precisely, make accurate claims, and provide evidence in support of their claims.

Impression-Leaving: This attribute refers to how affecting a person is as a communicator. What this person says as well as how he says it often leaves an impression. If people react to this person when they first meet and tend to remember him, this person is impression-leaving.

Communicator Image: This attribute refers to how good a communicator a person is. If a person finds it easy to talk on a one-to-one basis or in small groups with strangers, he has a good communicator image. A person who finds it easy to maintain a conversation with a member of the opposite sex has a good communicator image.

PS: The descriptions of the variables come from a study published by Norton. This is only in respect of his work and not with any other false intention.