Personality and Communication in Supervisor-Employee Relations

Introduction: Personality and Human Difference

Imagine that you are sitting in a room with three other people: a convicted serial killer, an eccentric scientist, and a four-year-old child. If you had to choose one, which one would you pick? Which qualities would you automatically associate with each individual? Which one do you think you most closely identify with? If this same situation were applied within a group of people sharing the same characteristics, the answers to each question would still vary. The reason for this difficulty in arriving at a clear answer is that there are so many differences among members of the human race. Human beings not only come in many shapes and sizes but also behave in very complex ways. Of the more than five billion people who presently inhabit our planet, no two are exactly alike.

Apart from the same bodily organs and systems, it is hard to imagine what "human nature" the three individuals identified above have in common. Such differences are often referred to as personality traits. The meanings of personality, as described by several recognized theorists in the field, are as diverse as the differences within the human race itself. One philosopher has described personality in terms of the self — an organized, permanent, subjectively perceived entity that is at the very heart of all our experiences (Rogers, 1951). Another has proposed that life proceeds through a series of psychosocial crises, with personality a function of their outcome (Erikson, 1982). Yet another has viewed personality as a complex pattern in which person, behavior, and situation continually influence each other (Bandura, 1982).

These varied interpretations suggest that personality, from a psychological perspective, signifies an essential aspect of the individual. Research has consistently shown that individual behavior and oral communication affect others and can influence the actions of others. Different people have different communication skills: one individual might have a personality that lends itself to effective interpersonal communication, while another may exhibit personality traits that negate it. Researchers have used studies on personality traits to analyze the supervisor-employee relationship, and many different approaches have been taken to effectuate a successful supervisory relationship through the study of personality and communication.

Managers have traditionally spent the majority of their time communicating in one form or another — through employee meetings, memos, and reports. This fact supports the idea that communication is a central part of managerial work. This is especially true now that service workers outnumber production workers and research as well as production processes emphasize greater collaboration and teamwork among workers across different functional groups. As a result, communication practices and technologies have become more important in all organizations, and most important of all in knowledge-intensive organizations and sectors. The study of organizational communication is not new, but it has only recently achieved recognition as a field of academic study, having grown largely in response to the needs and concerns of business.

The first communication programs were typically located in speech departments, but most business schools now include organizational communication as a key element of study. The field recognizes that communication in organizations goes far beyond training managers to be effective speakers or to develop good interpersonal communication skills. Interpersonal theory asserts that the client will "live" his or her maladaptive interpersonal style within the counseling session — a phenomenon often referred to as the social microcosm (Yalom, 1985).

Organizational Communication and Its Development

In interpersonal theory, the supervisor aids in the identification process by focusing on how the employee thinks, feels, and acts in response to the client. The employee also brings his or her problematic interpersonal behaviors into the counseling interaction. The supervisor then addresses these problematic behaviors by pointing out the continuity between the employee's behavior in sessions with clients and in the supervisory sessions themselves. The interpersonal approach to supervision is explicitly designed to deal with transference-countertransference issues. Findings from a study of verbal interactions between supervisor and employee indicated that, although supervisor support was the most frequent intervention, it did not lead to employee thinking and learning.

Furthermore, the results of that study found that no supervisor intervention could reliably predict cognitive responses from the employee. This suggests that interpersonal approaches to supervision might be best used with more advanced trainees. In a study conducted by Reising and Daniels, data revealed that employees who were beginning supervision were more anxious, dependent, and technique-oriented than more advanced students, and that beginning students were also less ready for confrontation.

That study concluded that there are two equally important sides to interpersonal competence: it is necessary to become skilled in the behaviors required for effective face-to-face interaction, and it is equally essential to learn how to interpret the behavior of others so that one's own behavior can be adjusted accordingly. Proponents of this study acknowledge that all organizations — not just business organizations — have communication needs and challenges. The field of organizational communication is highly diverse and is still working to develop and convey some sense of coherency across its many areas.

Communication is an extremely important method by which a supervisor's personality, social identity, status, and power are portrayed. In some supervisor-employee interactions, the relationship may be mostly interpersonal; in others, it may not be. A key factor for supervisors to remember is that the more a person identifies with his or her in-group, the more he or she will feel distinct from out-group members. In this way, communication is more often a function of the relative status or power of the interactants than of their personality. Research indicates that employees' perceptions of their supervisors' trustworthiness are based on features such as the supervisor's appreciation of the employee's worth as manifested on a day-to-day basis. A trusted supervisor has also been compared to one who takes a mentoring approach.

Supervisors are most likely to be trusted if they are seen to take a caring, mentoring approach with their staff while still being regarded as competent and respected. On the other hand, managers perceived as untrustworthy are seen as self-serving, failing to give recognition, and quick to blame and criticize — an image that marks them as incompetent. A review of the literature suggests that a good supervisor manages the relationship and power differences positively and simultaneously.

In past years, communication in small organizations was largely informal. As organizations increased in size, formal top-down communication became the main concern of organizational managers. In the present era, organizational communication has become far more complex and varied, and more important to overall organizational functioning and success. Recent emphasis has increasingly turned to understanding how new communication technologies can assist in bringing about new and more effective organizational forms and processes. There are two prominent views of organizational communication: the view that organizational communication is one aspect of an organization, and the view that it is the underlying basis of the organization itself.

Social Identity, Trust, and Power in Supervision

An example of organizational communication viewed as an aspect is the sending and receiving of messages by means of symbols, understood as a key element of organizational climate. An example of organizational communication as the underlying basis of an organization is the idea that the behavior of individuals in organizations is best understood from a communication standpoint. Changes confronting organizations and the associated changes in organizational forms have made organizational communication increasingly important to the overall function of the organization.

Another theory applicable to the supervisor-employee relationship is Social Identity Theory, defined as an individual's knowledge that he or she belongs to certain social or status groups, together with some emotional and value significance of that group membership. When one's social identity is salient, so too are out-group dynamics (Gallois & Giles, 1998). Some researchers contend that in some interactions the relationship is mostly interpersonal and the interactants perceive each other as individuals, while in other situations people interact primarily in terms of group-based identities or stereotypes (Gallois & Giles, 1998). Others have argued that communication is more often a function of the relative status or power of the interactants than of their personality (Hogg & Abrams, 1988). Both sets of findings conclude that most communication in supervisor-employee relationships is best understood as a function of the interactants' status or role.

It has also been posited that interactants' communication goals or motivations include seeking approval of the other person or signaling in-group or out-group membership. In-group status may be a prerequisite for employees to receive mentoring from their supervisors. Additional research indicates that in-group members receive more attention and support from their supervisor than out-group members, while out-group members experience a more formal supervisory relationship (Jones, Gallois, Callan & Baker, 1999). An understanding of how communication influences in-group and out-group perceptions is therefore extremely important to understanding trust in mentoring relationships.

Some researchers have distinguished between interpersonal communication, organizational and inter-organizational communication, and higher-order communication. Although interpersonal and group-level communication resides at a lower level than organizational communication, these forms are major components of organizational life and are prominently addressed in the organizational communication literature. As organizations became more communication-based, greater attention was directed at improving the interpersonal communication skills of all organizational members. Historically, informal communication was primarily seen as a potential block to effective organizational performance. This is no longer the case; ongoing, dynamic, and informal communication has become more important to ensuring the effective conduct of work.

It is also widely accepted that top managers should communicate directly with immediate supervisors, and that immediate supervisors should communicate with their direct reports. On issues of importance, top managers should then follow up by communicating with employees directly. The Communication Accommodation Theory supports this rationale. In terms of supervisor-employee communication, one researcher argues the difficulty of trusting someone who is perceived to have a distinct advantage (McCune, 1998). Recent studies have found that 43% of employees believe their supervisors cheat and lie to them, and 68% of employees do not trust their supervisors (Davis & Landa, 1999). Communication Accommodation Theory proposes that interactants draw upon a wide range of communication strategies — including approximation, interpersonal control, discourse management, and relational strategies — to achieve approval of the other person.

Research indicates that an effective communication practice is to communicate orally and then follow up in writing, often referred to as "downward communication." A consistent finding is that employee satisfaction with downward communication remains at a moderate level. Prior research has found low levels of satisfaction with strategies commonly used to enhance "upward communication," such as employee surveys, suggestion programs, employee grievance programs, and team meetings. Some of the reasons for this lack of satisfaction may be that these strategies often do not involve genuine two-way communication and are more likely to draw defensiveness on the part of managers. Other reasons why upward communication remains low include employees' fear of speaking their minds and the perception that their ideas or concerns are altered as they travel up the chain. Time is also a factor, as managers can give the impression that they do not have time to listen to employees.

Communication Strategies in the Supervisor-Employee Relationship

Lateral communication involves communication among persons who are not in a hierarchical relationship with one another. Lateral communication across managers has not been subject to much empirical research, and it has been assumed that lateral communication at the worker level is less problematic. With the rise of team-based work, more attention is now being directed at communication between team members. There is also increasing emphasis on communication across distributed workers and geographically separated work groups doing similar work, in an effort to promote learning and the sharing of expertise, best practices, and lessons learned.

Approximation strategies refer to interactants adjusting their communication style to sound more like the other individual. This is accomplished through elements such as vocabulary, jargon, accent, and nonverbal behaviors. Employees typically utilize approximation to signal affinity with or approval of the supervisor. Supervisors have recently moved away from approximation in some contexts in order to signal interpersonal or social distance or disapproval. This occurs because supervisors and employees are most likely to be attracted to people who are similar to themselves in terms of personal characteristics or group memberships, and because individuals are generally more likely to trust in-group members than out-group members.

Interpersonal control strategies refer to the supervisor's communication strategy of positioning him- or herself in a particular role or power position (Jones, Gallois, Callan & Baker, 1999). A supervisor may communicate superior status in the relationship, or may reduce perceived power differences by referring to employees as "fellow team members." To overcome boundaries created by the hierarchical relationship, managers may adopt a nurturing, mentoring role. A domineering or coercive communication style typically works against the establishment of trust. By contrast, the supervisor who utilizes in-group communication skills employs behaviors that reduce perceptions of power differences and emphasize interpersonal similarities, positioning the supervisor more as an individual than as a member of a higher-status out-group.

Discourse management strategies operate at a more discourse-oriented but equally powerful level. Research shows that higher-status individuals are more likely to display behaviors such as interrupting, dominating the conversation, controlling the choice of topic, using directives, and avoiding informal tone or self-disclosure (Jones, Gallois, Callan & Baker, 1999). At the discourse level, out-group perceptions are indicative of supervisors' lack of willingness to listen or communicate, their use of directives, and negatively perceived patterns of conversational control. These discourse behaviors clearly signal power and role distance, which directly and indirectly reduces employee trust.

Another element that a successful supervisor must implement in daily practice is active listening. Active listening signals that the speaker is taken seriously and that the listener cares. Self-disclosure is a powerful form of communication for breaking through the out-group barrier and personalizing the supervisor-employee relationship. Finally, relational strategies focus on communication behaviors that indicate support, empathy, inclusion, and genuine valuing of employees.

Three theoretical perspectives guide the study of communication: the technical, the contextual, and the negotiated perspectives. The technical view of communication is associated with information theory; the central question in information theory is how an information source can get a message to a destination with a minimum of distortion and error. In applying this mechanistic approach to interpersonal communication, the question remains the same, though the system is adapted and the analysis is less technical and mathematical. This view introduced into the communication system both human and interpersonal feedback elements. Subsequently, an array of human filters — influenced by a person's horizon of experience, including motive, affect, attention, knowledge, attitudes, values, and beliefs — have been specified.

The contextual approach to communication focuses on content, the accurate exchange of information, and the larger context of communication. It attends to nonverbal cues as well as verbal content, and examines the relational context between sender and receiver within the larger social, organizational, and cultural context. It regards words as symbols interpreted in context to create meaning and one's sense of both self and society. Discourse analysis is an extension and elaboration of the contextual perspective. Rather than examining a particular interpersonal exchange, discourse analysis looks at an overall body of communication — including formal and informal, oral and written communication of all types — with the goal of relating discourse patterns to patterns of social relations. Through discourse about itself, the organization enacts, shapes, defines, and marks its own boundaries. In this sense, discourse is simultaneously interpersonal and collective, inter-subjective and contextual.