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The verbal and nonverbal behaviors that individuals display (i.e., their communication styles) influence the status positions they attain in their task groups. Prior research has generally concluded that communication behaviors that convey agency (i.e., characteristics denoting intelligence, ambition, and dominance) are more effective for obtaining a high-status position in a task group than communication behaviors that convey communality (i.e., characteristics denoting warmth, sincerity, and agreeableness). The message from these prior studies is that it is more status enhancing to be smart than to be social. The objective of this chapter is to challenge this assertion and argue that in some task groups it may be more status enhancing to be social rather than to be smart. I suggest that the status benefits of particular communication styles depend on the characteristics of the group to which an individual belongs to. Thus, in contrast to prior research in this area, I argue for a more contextual approach to the study of communication styles and status conferral, focusing on how structural and process differences between groups influence how the group members’ words and actions are evaluated.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how nonprofit service providers can better engage their customers through online communication. It identifies two communication styles and three communication functions, and examines their impact on customer commenting, customer liking and customer sharing.

Similar to Python for Facebook, a software package for the automatic retrieval of web page content was developed specifically for this study to extract data from the microblog Sina Weibo. Following the successful retrieval of 1,500 randomly selected messages from 34 universities in China, a two-level regression was performed using Mplus 7 to examine the association between the proposed relationships.

The findings reveal that messages with a friendly communication style increase both the number of comments and their positive tone; an authoritative style has no effect on customer engagement. The functions associated with message content (spreading information, building community or promoting action) influence customer liking and sharing. Building community tends to engage more customers than spreading information; promoting action often generates the least customer engagement in social media settings.

The study fills an important research gap in the service marketing literature as it pertains to nonprofit service organizations (i.e. universities) by identifying two types of online identities based on the communication style and the messages posted on social media. This study is the first to investigate the relationship between identity type and audience engagement, and to analyze the moderating factors of this relationship.

The inherent characteristics of professional services (i.e. high in credence properties, customized and featuring information asymmetry) often cause difficulties for clients to confidently evaluate technical outcomes before, during or even after service delivery. This results in considerable client psychological discomfort. This study aims to blend a revised social interaction model and uncertainty reduction theory to investigate the role that service provider’s interpersonal communication style plays in establishing client psychological comfort and satisfaction in a health-care context.

The study draws on cross-sectional data collected from 355 hospital patients following visiting a physician plus an experimental design in an Eastern culture (Thailand).

The study reveals three key findings. First, an affiliative communication style is positively associated with psychological comfort, but not so a dominant communications style. When both styles are presented, the high-affiliative style overshadows the low-dominant style and creates the highest psychological comfort. Second, clients’ perceptions of professional’s affiliative and dominant styles influence psychological comfort differentially under varying conditions of clients’ cognitive social capital, collectivist value-orientation but not service criticality. Third, a competing model suggests psychological comfort acts as a partial mediator between affiliative communication style and satisfaction.

To generalize the findings, further studies might be conducted in other professional services and in individualist Western cultures.

The findings have important managerial implications for the appropriate use of communication style to build psychological comfort and engage clients of professional services firms.

The findings shed light on the important role of an everyday social function – interpersonal communications and how this impacts client psychological comfort and satisfaction.

This is one of the few studies in a services context that examines the impact of professionals’ communications style. Moreover, it examines the impact of cultural value-orientation, cognitive social capital, service criticality in moderating the communications style – client psychological comfort relationship.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate the role of relational competences, such as open-mindedness and the ability to adapt business style, in developing trustworthy relationships through communication in the export markets in different cultural contexts.

The analysis is performed on survey-based data from a sample consisting of 39.9 percent of the total population of Norwegian seafood companies involved in exporting, including 108 business relationships.

The findings reveal that adaptive business style and communication mediate the overall effect of open-mindedness on trust building between partners in the export markets. The adaptive business style fully explains the effect of open-mindedness on communication. Open-minded persons are better prepared to achieve communication on a high level because they are more likely to adapt to a new business style. Performing adaptive business style improves communication, particularly when the importer belongs to a dissimilar culture. For trust building, communication is equally important, irrespective of cultural differences.

Exporter should aim at recruiting open-minded people because they have the advantage that they are capable of performing a variety of negotiation styles and business approaches, depending on the situation.

This paper develops a model that integrates key constructs from the relational paradigm with constructs rooted in different research streams, extending our knowledge regarding salespeople competences that are important in order to develop business relationships in export markets.

Ting‐Toomey's (1988) face‐negotiation theory of conflict predicts that choice of conflict style is closely associated with face‐negotiation needs, which vary across cultures. This study investigated this prediction in a workplace setting involving status and face‐concern with a sample of 163 Anglo‐Australian and 133 Chinese university students who were working full or part‐time. The association of type of communication (direct or cautious) according to type of face‐threat (self or other) and work status (subordinate, co‐worker or superior) with preferences for three conflict management styles (control, solution‐oriented, non‐confrontational) was examined for the two cultural groups. The results showed that: (1) as predicted by the individualist‐collectivist dimension, Anglo respondents rated assertive conflict styles higher and the non‐confrontational style lower than their Chinese counterparts; (2) overall, both Anglo and Chinese respondents preferred more direct communication strategies when self‐face was threatened compared with other‐face threat; (3) status moderated responses to self and other‐face threat for both Anglos and Chinese; (4) face‐threat was related to assertive and diplomatic conflict styles for Anglos and passive and solution‐oriented styles for Chinese. Support was shown for Ting‐Toomey's theory; however the results indicated that, in applied settings, simple predictions based on only cultural dichotomies might have reduced power due to workplace role perceptions having some influence. The findings were discussed in relation to areas of convergence and the two cultural groups; widening the definition of “face”; and providing a more flexible model of conflict management incorporating both Eastern and Western perspectives.

Chatbots are increasingly used in online retail settings and are becoming a powerful tool for brands to engage customers. However, consumers’ satisfaction with these chatbots is mixed. Thus, this paper aims to investigate how using a social- versus task-oriented anthropomorphic communication style can improve customer satisfaction.

The authors explore the link between the anthropomorphic communication style use and customer perceptions/customer satisfaction in online customer service interactions. Two experiment scenarios were developed to test these links.

Overall, using a social-oriented communication style boosts customer satisfaction. Warmth perception of the chatbot mediates this effect, while chatbot’s anthropomorphised role (servant versus partner) moderates this effect.

This paper enriches the bilateral communication literature by extending the investigation on communication style effects to chatbot service interactions and revealing the psychological process driving the impacts. It also adds to the existing literature on chatbots as a customer service and contributes to the prominent topic examining how consumers react to artificial intelligence that is used to establish and maintain a relationship with them. Additionally, the authors also make contribution to the warmth and competence literature by demonstrating that customers can interpret social cues in chatbot service interactions mainly based on the warmth dimension. Thus, the authors further add to the growing chatbot humanness perception literature and respond to the calls for investigating more anthropomorphic design cues to enhance chatbot humanness. Finally, the authors also provide a way to help reconcile seemingly conflicting prior findings.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the structure of leader communication style in the context of organizational change. In doing so, the authors intend to shed more light on how leaders can effectively communicate change projects to their subordinates, which is viewed as the key to implementing change initiatives.

This paper builds an integrated conceptual model for understanding leader’s communication style and subordinates’ commitment to change. By analyzing subordinates’ different fears of change, the paper further proposes a multidimensional structure of leader communication style in the context of change. The authors then develop a scale to measure these different dimensions and test the relationship between the proposed communication style and subordinates’ affective commitment to change.

Leader communication style in the context of change is found to be composed of five dimensions: hope orientation, reality orientation, subordinate orientation, support orientation, and enforcement orientation. A cross-level field study of 31 teams and 194 members shows that hope orientation, subordinate orientation, and support orientation are positively associated with subordinates’ affective commitment to change.

This paper identifies a new structure of leader communication style that will lead to a richer understanding of how leaders communicate to their subordinates in the context of change. It also contributes to the leadership literature by implying effective ways of communicating change projects.

Some studies, mainly in the West, have suggested that women are more encouraging in their communication styles than men, especially when the conversation is about a personal matter versus when it is business‐related. It has also been contended that same‐sex communication between women is more supportive than both mixed‐sex communication and same‐sex communication between men. However, this research, conducted in Hong Kong among full‐ and part‐time tertiary students, shows that the above contentions are perhaps culture dependent, and that careful re‐examination of gender‐based differences is warranted, particularly when one is considering communication styles at work.

This study aims to examine the relationship between service providers' communication style and customer satisfaction and how service criticality and nature moderate this relationship.

The methodology included systematic sampling of consumers of professional services.

Although a service provider's communication style significantly relates to customer satisfaction, the relationship is moderated by service criticality and service nature. To enhance customer satisfaction, communication characterized by high affiliation is more important in high‐ than in low‐critical situations. Low dominance in communication is more important in low‐critical situations, but the level of dominance is unimportant in high‐critical situations. On the other hand, high affiliation is more important for credence services, but the level of affiliation is unimportant for experience services. Low dominance is more important for experience services, and high dominance is more important for credence services.

The findings imply that service firm managers need to train their employees to consider the criticalness and the nature of the service being sold and then how to adjust their communication style accordingly. Because the research reported here focuses on professional services, future research needs to determine the effects of communication style on customer satisfaction for other types of services.

In conclusion, the findings generally support the theoretical orientations of the social interaction model and script theory in that there is a positive relationship between customers' satisfaction with service providers' communication style and with the service rendered. However, service criticality and the service nature need to be considered when deciding on the optimum service employee communication style.

This paper investigated the interactions between gender stereotypes for jobs, applicant gender, and the communication styles used by male and female applicants during an interview. This study was conducted as a laboratory experiment, utilizing a 2x2x2 mixed design. Subjects read one job description and heard three audiotapes of all male or all female job applicants exhibiting a dominant, submissive, or neutral communication style. The subjects then rated the applicant on five dimensions. These dimensions are likeability, competence, sociability, overall impression, and hireability. Results showed significant interactions of applicant gender and communication style on four of the five dimensions rated in this study. An inspection of the dimension means revealed different effects for gender‐appropriate and gender‐inappropriate behavior for males and females. Males were penalized on ratings of overall impression and hireability for communicating in stereotypically gender‐inappropriate manners. Females were penalized on ratings of sociability and likeability for communicating in a stereotypically gender‐inappropriate fashion. The implications of these findings for using interviews are then discussed in terms of aversive genderism.