Language is power
in ways far more literal than most imagine. Check out your local bookstore’s
business section and you’ll find a large assortment of books offering their
prescriptions for leadership language. You can find books on “power words,” “power
talking,” and even “sound like a leader.”
What underlies all of these books is the belief that your communication style impacts your status and productivity at work and in life. Simply put, those who speak assertively tend to get the goodies. It’s surprising to most that something as subtle and nuanced as speech styles should effect matters of great consequence. But it’s true that powerful speakers get hired and promoted faster, get quicker raises and command more respect than those who talk in a tentative, uncertain manner. So, not surprisingly, social scientists have documented a consistent relationship between speech styles and the attainment of status.
In fascinating research, Alison Fragale, of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School, argues that though assertive speech gains the rewards of status, powerless speech, too, can confer. . .
To get at the distinctives of speech style, Fragale examines the status conferral decisions—who gets the attention and the status—and who doesn’t. But most individuals hold fairly fixed insights about who gets high and low status. For example, most believe that business professionals and the rich who are typically thought to be highly proactive, self-regulating and self-centered, but not especially oriented to and protective of the community have the most status. In contrast, members of low-status groups such as housewives and the elderly are viewed as highly communal. Since these perspectives are widely held and applied broadly, powerful speech should always confer status on the speaker—and powerless speech should always convey lower status.
That, as Fragale’s research indicates, is not always the case.
Task interdependence
Fragale’s research assumes that the degree to which group
members need to collaborate to achieve their objectives should be impacted by
speech style. Thus, to isolate the issues of status, she focuses upon task interdependence, using two methodologies and 111 university participants. After
working together on an earlier project which served as checks for the speech manipulation,
team members were asked, by means of a questionnaire, to rate their partner’s
speech style. Based on a series of steps to be completed in the questionnaire,
employees must reach a merit recommendation on their partners along with a recommended
merit pay increase. Some participants
were required to be highly independent in their appraisal, while others were
required to work together (dependently). The questionnaire presented the
questions regarding their colleagues on a 7-point scale (1 = not at all; 7 = a
great deal).
The research, built upon previous studies, solid assumptions and thorough methology,is not at all quirky. It reveals that the participants in the low task interdependence thought that a partner should be conferred more status than did participants whose partner used a powerless speech style. However, when the task interdependence was high, the participants thought that the powerless speech style was deserving of more status. The conclusion? The criteria for judgments in a group change as the criteria for successful performance changes.
First, the findings indicate that behaviors that have been traditionally thought ineffective for acquiring status are not necessarily so. Second, the research showed that we prefer highly proactive speech style for individuals in groups requiring independent judgments, but we prefer highly communal speech style for individuals in groups requiring dependent/collaborative judgments.
Thus, there is no single or fixed interpersonal style guaranteeing success. Instead, speech style is highly contingent upon context. Fragale’s conclusion reflects earlier research on leadership style which suggests that for success, the style chosen should be dependent upon the needs of the employee or the group. Clearly, there is no fixed or single speech or leadership style that merits success. It all depends.
Fragale’s work emphasizes the necessity of a great deal of speech versatility for long term success. Interpersonal smarts, including powerless speech style, is an important factor of career success. But significantly, her research emphasizes that “language is a defining feature of human interaction.” As I wrote in last week’s blog, language truly shapes both our thinking and our behavior.
Alison Fragale (2006), The Power of powerless speech: The effects of speech style and task interdependence on status conferral. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 101, 243-261.
Flickr photo:JAS_photo