Judith M. Dallinger

A Lewinian perspective on taking conflict personally: Revision, refinement, and validation of the instrument

Taking conflict personally (TCP) has been defined as a negative emotional reaction to participating in a conflict. This paper locates the notions of affective climate in general, and TCP in particular, within a Lewinian frame. The theoretical connections among field theory, defensiveness, attributions, and TCP are described. Earlier work has generated a multidimensional scale for measurement of TCP, and has shown the subscales’ associations with argumentativeness, verbal aggressiveness, communication apprehension, own conflict style, superiors conflict style, arguing behaviors, communication competence, and organizational climate. The present investigation responds to some psychometric and conceptual difficulties with the original version of the TCP scales by revising the measurement instrument. This paper proposes items for the measurement of six TCP subscales: direct personalization, persecution feelings, stress reaction, positive relational effects, negative relational effects, and like/dislike valenc...

Arguers as editors

People use editorial criteria to decide whether to say or to suppress potential arguments. These criteria constitute peoples standards as to what effective and appropriate arguments are like, and reflect general interaction goals. A series of empirical investigations has indicated that the standards fall into three classes: those having to do with argument effectiveness, those concerned with personal issues for arguer and target, and those centered on discourse quality. The essay also sketches the affinities certain types of people have for the different criteria.

On the etiology of the rebuff phenomenon: Why are persuasive messages less polite after rebuffs?

The rebuff phenomenon is a robust empirical regularity that emerges from many compliance gaining studies, using widely varying methodologies. The effect is this: when a persuader is confronted with a rebuff, his/her next message will tend to be be ruder and more aggressive than the initial appeal. This could be due to repertoire exhaustion, or to a change in the persuaders standards for acceptable messages. The second possibility is hypothesized here, and results support that explanation. Lewins field theory accounts for this outcome. Connecting the rebuff phenomenon to appraisal theory also would advance our understanding of sequential compliance gaining.

The Use of Multiple Goals in Cognitive Editing of Arguments.

The editorial criteria reported in earlier studies of the research program on cognitive editing of arguments are, in this study, factor analyzed and found to fall into three main categories: effect...

Androgyny and rhetorical sensitivity: The connection of gender and communicator style

As currently conceptualized, both gender and communicator style can be described as the product of many small behaviors that individuals enact throughout the day, as well as filters for interpreting and making sense of human behavior. This study examined whether gender can be expressed productively through communicator style. Both categorical and continuous versions of each of these variables were obtained from survey data using the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI) (Bem, 1974) and the RHETSEN scale (Hart, Carlson, & Eadie, 1980). After taking into account the tendency for the diverse individuals included in this sample to respond with high levels on both masculine and feminine items, results generally showed that Rhetorically Sensitive communicators tended to be non‐differentiated in gender role, Noble Selves were more likely to be masculine, and Rhetorical Reflectors were androgynous. BSRI scores suggest that people may now accept the desirability of androgyny and flexibility in gender‐based characteristics...

Self‐monitoring and the cognitive editing of arguments

This report improves upon the authors’ previous investigations of naive actors’ argument standards in two ways: (a) by using a checklist to obtain subjects’ rationales for not using various arguments and (b) by using multiple operationalizations of each compliance gaining strategy. Overall results correspond generally to those of the earlier studies: effectiveness concerns account for 23.5% of rejections, principled objections to specific strategies for 15.7%, person‐centered issues for 26.1%, and discourse competence rules for 34.6%. The self‐monitoring scale has serious psychometric problems and does not strongly predict use of rejection criteria.

The effects of gender on compliance gaining strategy endorsement and suppression

This study reports a secondary data analysis of eight separate studies of cognitive editing, with a combined sample size of 1471. These data had revealed inconsistent results with regard to the question of whether males and females edit their persuasive messages differently. This investigation reveals that gender has modest direct effects on endorse‐or‐suppress decisions. These results are consistent with those obtained in several recent meta‐analyses of related research traditions. It is possible that genders interactions with other variables may be promising for future research.

The Developmental Nature of Self-Disclosure

This study investigated the nature of self-disclosure in developing relationships. After completing various tasks on three separate occasions, 88 students completed a measure of self-disclosure. Analysis indicated that amount of disclosure increased consistently, while depth of disclosure consistently decreased across time. The dimensions of honesty and intent of disclosure fluctuated across time, while positiveness of disclosure did not change. Discussion concerned suggestions for research.

Supervisor Accessibility and Job Characteristics.

Dyadic and normative accessibility are hypothesized to correlate positively with three task dimensions: variety, autonomy and identity. The presumed independence of the dyadic and normative accessibility scales is also investigated. Data were collected from 40 middle level managers in a variety of organizations. Results show significant relationships between dyadic accessibility and the characteristics of variety and autonomy. Tasks with high identity plausibly do not require much supervision. Follerts scale for normative accessibility seems to have some serious validity problems, and probably ought to be replaced or newly validated.