Characteristics and Consequences of Interpersonal Complaints Associated with Perceived Face Threat

Abstract

The current study proposes that recipients' aversive reactions to complaints are a function of perceived face threat. One hundred and ninety-nine college students completed a survey asking them to describe in detail a recent complaint they had received from a friend or romantic partner, and to describe their response to that complaint. Respondents completed measures designed to assess their reactions to the complaint, including perceived face threat, negative affect, fairness, and damage to the relationship. As predicted, dispositional complaints were perceived to be more face threatening than nondispositional complaints, and complaints delivered in public were more face threatening than complaints delivered in private. Both positive and negative face threat were associated with the complaint recipient's anger/hurt and defensiveness. Perceptions of positive face threat also were associated with perceptions of less fairness and greater perceived damage to the relationship, whereas perceived threat to negative face predicted the recipient's feelings of embarrassment and anxiety/depression. The findings indicate that the face-threatening nature of complaints is associated with adverse relational consequences. Perceived threats to positive face, which tend to convey relational devaluation, were more strongly associated with relational damage than were threats to negative face.

The Benefits and Risks of Telling and Listening to Stories of Difficulty Over Time: Experimentally Testing the Expressive Writing Paradigm in the Context of Interpersonal Communication Between Friends

“…The researcher then left the room to turn on video-recording equipment and to allow participants to converse for 10 minutes. Once they concluded their conversation, each completed the measures assessing psychological well-being, as well as measures related to their perceptions about their friends' interpersonal communication, including other's communicated perspective-taking, communication competence (Guererro, 1994), and face threats (Cupach & Carson, 2002).…”

Public versus Private Voice

“…In particular, our results indicate that public voice is more likely when a manager has a high level of self-efficacy and the voicing employee is not part of the manager's ingroup. This suggests that high LMX employees generally are reluctant to engage in public voice as they fear undermining the loyalty-based relationship that they entertain with their managers (P. Brown & Levinson, 1987;Burgoon, 2009;Cupach & Carson, 2002).…”

“…People experiencing image threat are strongly motivated to defend their image and are likely to engage in defensive reactions (Goffman, 1967). Such reactions are characterized by negative emotions including anger and hostility toward objects that are perceived as causing image harm as well as counter attacks (Cupach & Carson, 2002) or public discounting of the credibility or validity of any challenging information (Ilgen, Fisher, & Taylor, 1979). For example, individuals who feel threatened by unfavourable evaluations become less receptive to feedback which they simply might ignore or dismiss DeNisi & Kluger, 2000;Tuckey, Brewer, & Williamson, 2002).…”

Ingroups and Outgroups in Complaints: Exploring Politic Behaviour in Nurses’ Discourse

“…In this light, direct complaints are a socially negatively evaluated speech act because they may damage interactants' face, threatening their self-image. Interlocutors can, however, positively manage their social relations by mitigating the effect of the complaint in order to avoid relational devaluation (Cupach & Carson, 2002). This interactional move would necessarily, according to Brown and Levinson (1987), result in 'polite' linguistic behaviour (Spencer-Oatey, 2005).…”