Robert Freed Bales was a pioneer in small group communication research. His works on Personality, Interpersonal behaviour, and Interaction analysis systems are being used even today as reference. That makes his literature a standard to begin and be beyond for the contemporary scholars.

One of his studies was a systematic multi-level observation of groups. The study sought to understand how communication patterns evolve in small groups and what types of roles do people tend to take in groups and so on. It was also called the SYMLOG Model. The pictures here give an idea about what he did. The cube represents a universe of personality types in group interaction setting, the second picture explains the notation, and the third picture describes what each personality in the cube represents.

This piece of research he did is one source of inspiration that drove Norton towards conceiving a communication style construct. Inherently, this model talks about communicative predispositions people tend to take. For example, let me present some description given by Bales for one of these types here. Look at the first square from left on the top side of the cube; it represents the UNF type personality, and here is how Bales describes it:

The person in the UNF role has a prominent place in the group. His total interaction initiated is high, though not necessarily the highest in the group. He tends, even so, to “overtalk”; His tendency to talk to the group as a whole, rather than particular members, is high, but his total interaction received from others is only average. Either he tends to prevent replies, by overtalking, or others tend to withhold replies, or both.

Eventually, many of the research methods used in communication style research also seem to have been inspired by techniques Bales used. It would be very interesting to look into what Bales did in the field of communication. May be, I would sometime come up with a series of posts just on what he did.

PS: The images were drawn from google books only for reference. The link is therefore provided to the original source.