Attributing the sources of accuracy in unequal-power dyadic communication: Who is better and why?

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Abstract

A study was conducted to assess accuracy of deliberate nonverbal communication of affective messages between individuals assigned to different power roles within dyads. In phase 1, participants (N = 158) were assigned to unequal- or to equal-power roles and asked to send positive, negative, and neutral messages to their partner using nonverbal cues while the partner guessed which kind of message it was. In phase 2, naïve decoders (N = 294) made judgments of the videotapes from phase 1 to resolve the confounding of sender and decoder factors in the within-dyad communication paradigm. Results showed that subordinates were more accurate at decoding superiors than vice versa, and that this difference was due to subordinates sending less clear messages to superiors than superiors sent to subordinates. Comparison with the equal-power group’s expressions revealed that the subordinates’ expressions were also less clear than those sent by the equal-power group.

Section snippets

Overview

In phase 1, participants were run in dyads and randomly assigned to be the owner of a mock art gallery (high-power role) or a person applying for the job of the owner’s assistant (low-power role), or to be equal partners (co-owners of the gallery). The owner conducted a job interview with the assistant and then they had a discussion about choosing several works of art (which were on display in the laboratory room) for the Gallery. During both tasks the owner was in the leadership position, and

Original dyads’ decoding accuracy (phase 1)

Although accuracy in the phase 1 dyads can equally be called encoding accuracy or decoding accuracy (because these are fully confounded), for simplicity we refer to their accuracy as decoding accuracy, for parallelism with the phase 2 scores reported later. We first examined decoding accuracy in the unequal-power dyads to determine if there were any differences between assistants and owners.

Discussion

The goal of the present research was to disentangle the sources of decoding accuracy when people in equal or unequal power dyads communicated affective messages to one another using nonverbal cues. We found that subordinates (assistants in a mock art gallery) were more accurate in decoding affective cues conveyed by their superiors (owners in the art gallery) than vice versa.

As explained earlier, there are two significant ambiguities about the sources of accuracy in a within-dyad communication

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  • This article is dedicated to the memory of Sara Snodgrass. This research was supported by a grant from the National Science Foundation to the first author. The authors are grateful to Sara Eltzroth, Jenna Lavery, Alycia Piccone, and Andrea Sparko for their help in conducting this study, Patricia Noller for sharing her communication task with us and giving permission to adapt it, and Marianne Schmid Mast for providing helpful comments on the manuscript.

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