„‚ CONDITIONS THAT HINDER EFFECTIVE COMMUNICATION

ut further work that attempted to determine the most important category yielded no
reliable results.
James W. Taylor, a staff psychologist with a large U.S. corporation (cited in Merrill
& Reid, 1981), created a structured, adjective checklist and asked people to describe
their own behaviors. Five categories emerged: self-confident, considerate, conforming,
thoughtful, and rigid. Merrill and Reid decided to use a different approach with the
checklist, asking numerous people to describe the behavior of one specific person. The
results of this work led to the development of the following three scales: 1
1. Assertiveness: the tendency to tell or to ask, to influence or not to influence the
decisions of others;
2. Responsiveness: the tendency to emote or to control one’s feelings, to display
openly or not to express emotion; and
3. Versatility: the ability to be adaptable, resourceful, and competent or to be
inflexible and rigid.
Because versatility is the ability to change one’s behavior on both the assertiveness
and responsiveness scales to accommodate other people’s preferences, the social-style
profile is formed by using the assertiveness and responsiveness scales. 2
Merrill and Reid, through the TRACOM Corporation, offer social-style awareness
training based on identifying, responding to, and adjusting to individual behaviors to
produce more satisfactory relationships.
The Goals of Social-Style Awareness
The four stated objectives of social-style awareness training are as follows:
1. Know yourself. Identify the strengths of your style and understand that overuse
of strengths can lead to perceived negative attributes or weaknesses.
2. Control yourself. Identify and take the growth actions required by your style.
3. Know others. Identify the strengths of other styles and understand that it is
overuse of strengths that leads to perceived weaknesses. Regard others as
different rather than as wrong or bad.
1
All three scales have been tested and determined reliable; assertiveness and versatility have been tested and found valid. See the
“Appendix” in Personal Styles and Effective Performance, by David W. Merrill and Roger H. Reid, 1981, Radnor, PA: Chilton Book
Company.
2
Although Merrill and Reid claim that styles should be viewed philosophically as different rather than as good or bad and that
versatility is an independent dimension, research by Snavley (1981) indicates that certain styles are perceived more favorably than others in
certain situations. His findings include the following:
1. Perceived versatility, trustworthiness, character, sociability, similarity, and social attraction are higher for responsive than
nonresponsive styles.
2. Perceived competence, interpersonal power, and task attraction are higher for assertive than nonassertive styles.
These conclusions may suggest that an expressive style, high in both assertiveness and responsiveness, is more desirable than other
styles when primary relationships are at stake. These scales yield four style types that can be differentiated in terms of behavior (see Figure 1).
106 ❘❚
The Pfeiffer Library Volume 6, 2nd Edition. Copyright ©1998 Jossey-Bass/Pfeiffer