In an era when leadership is much studied and little understood (Tourish & Barge, 2010), and when job satisfaction has reached an all-time low (Gibbons, 2010), investigating factors that contribute to job and relationship satisfaction, as well as more effective leadership, becomes a critical task. This project asked 154 people employed fulltime to evaluate their work supervisor in terms of specific communication behaviors, perceived leader effectiveness, and their own levels of relational and job satisfaction. Gibb's (1961) theory of supportive and defensive communication provided the conceptual lens used to explicate the impact of communication behaviors on specific personal and organizational outcomes. Statistical analysis highlighted the discursive nature of workplace interaction by uncovering strong, predictive relationships between the positive behaviors of spontaneity and empathy and worker perceptions of supervisor effectiveness, relational satisfaction, and employee job satisfaction. Likewise, perceptions of supervisor leadership style are instantiated in these same communication behaviors suggesting that leadership is indeed a communication phenomenon. Last, t-tests revealed that supervisors rated higher in effectiveness and higher in relational satisfaction utilized all six of Gibb's supportive communication behaviors more, and all six defensive behaviors less, than their more negatively evaluated peers.
Social identity theory provides a frame for studying the relationship between communication and interaction patterns and college student spirituality. In this project we measured the self-perceived spirituality, personal attitudes toward self and others, and communication of a convenience sample of N=149 college students at a private, four-year, church-related institution in southern California. We found that traditionalism, a stable belief in the values and attitudes reflected in how one is raised, explained 60% of student spirituality scores. Gregariousness, the measure of connectedness a participant feels to a group or to the institution, explained an additional 5.2% of student spirituality. Additional post hoc analysis revealed a statistically significant negative association between rebelliousness and both traditionalism and spirituality scores. We also utilized two t-Tests to compare lower and upper class students, as well as females and males, on the variables of interest. Upper class students reported higher scores on spirituality, life satisfaction, gregariousness, positive attitude toward tradition, and self-disclosure whereas lower class members scored higher only in rebelliousness. In addition, females scored higher on all of the variables measured in comparison to males, with the exception of rebelliousness. Findings demonstrated that education at a private Christian institution did not erode student spirituality and may have strengthened spirituality over the four year period.
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