Week Six: Saving Face

The article "10 instances where being rude doesn't pay" outlines a number of examples of Politeness Theory at work in the airline industry.  Any of the ten anecdotes can be used to demonstrate negative face whether it be the burnt-out flight attendant who made fun of passengers or the VIP passenger who threw her coat on a flight attendant.  Each of these examples depict someone making the decision to act freely without regard for the person they are communicating with.  A few of the examples show individuals performing bald on record face threatening acts including example number three in which a man communicated rudely and abrasively toward a flight attendant who was trying to upgrade his seat to first class. The flight attendant performed corrective facework by calming explaining her request and offering the upgrade to the man sitting next to the rude passenger.  In example number two, a flight attendant on his last flight before he took a new job miscalculated the social distance and power of a frequent flier when he performed a face threatening act by publicly berating the man only to find out later this passenger was the boss he was hoping to go to work for.

Week Five: Reducing uncertainty

I was hired into my current position in January of this year and have spent the last three months desperately attempting to reduce the amount of uncertainty I feel with my immediate supervisor.  It has been much easier to develop clarity and confidence in my relationships with other co-workers which, according to D&Z, is for a number of reasons.  The first relates to the incentive value of our interaction - my boss is the only individual that has the ability to provide me with rewards or punishments.  Secondly, I work with her everyday in ways that I don't with other co-workers which is explained as the anticipation of future interaction condition of our relationship. 

Almost immediately I sensed that my supervisor and I did not share the same ways of communicating.  These differences caused friction between us right away.  Initially I used what D&Z called passive strategy and observed how she interacted and communicated with others at our firm - her peers, my peers, her boss, her former assistant, etc.  These observations made me feel even more uneasy about our interactions.   I inferred that her behaviors demonstrated low consensus (others were very pleasant toward me), high consistency (mostly unpleasant when interacting with me) and low distinctiveness (because her negativity happens often). 

When my passive strategy for reducing uncertainty left me with more questions than answers, I approached her former assistant who is now a peer co-worker of mine to determine if she had similar interactions with my supervisor (active strategy).  I was somewhat relieved to find that she had. 

Soon after I spoke with her former assistant, my supervisor and I had a serious disagreement that caused me to confront her in a public way and then schedule a private meeting later that day to discuss.  And without realizing it, I had initiated an interactive strategy for getting to the bottom of our uncomfortable interactions.  We spent more than a half hour discussing our misunderstandings leading up to the confrontation. 

Since our meeting, our interactions have been more pleasant. The conversation helped us to identify our differences in communication styles and interpretations.  It's only been a couple weeks so I can't definitively that my uncertainty with her has been reduced however, it seems to be moving forward on a more positive path.

Week Four: Experience with SET

Although I didn't have a title for it and perhaps didn't even realize I was making an analysis, Social Exchange Theory was instrumental in my decision to end my oldest friendship.  M and I had been like sisters for 16 years - from the time we were 12 years old to 28 years of age.  Looking back it was always a dysfunctional friendship but felt normal to us (we hadn't come from the most emotionally healthy and communicative families). As we left our small town and went off to college, I began seeing that the costs from this friendship heavily outweighed the benefits.  This new awareness came from comparing my friendship with M to my relationships with new college friends.  As I began to notice the negatives were outweighing the positives, I began attempts at altering the dysfunction in our relationship.  However, because relationships are two-way streets and M wasn't emotionally ready to make changes, I spent 7 years trying to evolve our friendship on my own.  When that didn't work, I analyzed my options: stay in an unhealthy, enmeshed friendship that lacks the kinds of benefits that I need in relationships OR end the friendship and put that energy into the other healthy relationships I had developed in adulthood.  I chose the latter.  And it was painful.  Painful for her and painful for me.  But ultimately less exhausting and stressful that it was to stay in this friendship.  I don't think she has forgiven me for severing ties but I know it was the best thing for both of us.

Week Three: Uncovering my MDL

I have had the pleasure (and many times displeasure) of spending most of my professional career working under two very intelligent, accomplished and expressive women.  And it has been exhausting.  The expressive message design logic is a reactive approach to communication and before I had terminology to describe this behavior I would infer that my bosses were miserable, egotistical, rude, and thoughtless.  At other times I considered them appropriately direct, and because of that directness, inspiring.  As a professional who uses what I consider the conventional MDL, many times I took their words personally and became extremely offended by what I considered inappropriate outbursts.  Other times (when not directed at me) I admired their courage to say what was on their mind and assert themselves. 

My conventional message design logic requires me to constantly be hyper-aware and analyze every word (gesture, facial expression, etc) in a conversation.  This too is ultimately exhausting.  Over the last few months, I have begun to contemplate and address my tendencies toward passiveness, aggressiveness and assertiveness. I tend toward passivity when dealing with authority figures but become aggressive when pushed to my limit because I haven't yet developed my assertive voice. Understanding these tendencies in relation to the expressive, conventional and rhetoric message design logics assists me in continuing to mature my communication style.  I hope one day I will operate more in the rhetoric MDL style - proactive instead of reactive (or no reaction at all).