Investigating goals to change communication styles: an empirical study

The goal of the present study was to investigate the relations between people’s communication styles, communication satisfaction, communication effectiveness, functional maturity and their change goals. A pilot study with 11 participants was used to explore the level of social desirability of the six communication style domains namely Expressiveness, Preciseness, Verbal Aggressiveness, Questioningness, Emotionality and Impression Manipulativeness. In the main study, the communication styles and change goals of 132 participants were measured using two questionnaires – the Communication Styles Inventory (CSI) and the Change Goals CSI (C-CSI). Furthermore, participants’ level of communication satisfaction, communication effectiveness and functional maturity were measured using questionnaires adapted from previous studies. Preciseness, Questioningness, Expressiveness and Impression Manipulativeness were identified as a socially desirable (positive) communication style while Verbal Aggressiveness and Emotionality were negative relative to the theoretical scale mean. The results showed that most people wanted to increase with respect to Preciseness and wanted to decrease with respect to Verbal Aggressiveness. CSI-X, CSI-P and CSI-Q showed positive correlations with communication satisfaction, communication effectiveness and functional maturity (except the correlation between CSI-X and communication satisfaction). The other CSI domain scales, namely CSI-VA, CSI-E and CSI-IM had negative correlations with communication satisfaction, communication effectiveness and functional maturity.