Manager's Verbal and Nonverbal Cues of Agency and Communality
Project leads: Anely Bekbergenova and Regina Hagl
Funding: Dieter Schwarz Foundation
Project description
The project “Manager's Verbal and Nonverbal Cues of Agency and Communality" aims to empower managerial communication and training through (a) leveraging agentic and communal verbal cues and (b) investigating training using immersive virtual reality.
In the first pillar of our project, we explore how female managers can utilize agentic and communal verbal cues in their communication to reconcile the double bind, not compromising their felt authenticity, or triggering the backlash effect. We investigate real life use of agentic and communal verbal cues in the official communication of successful managers. Also, we conduct carefully designed and pretested experiments to test whether agentic, communal, blended, or neutral cues lead to the best outcomes in terms of positive perceptions related to leadership for female managers. Finally, we have designed a practical communication workshop intervention to also investigate the self-evaluations of female managers when they are encouraged to use either agentic or communal cues in their managerial communication.
In the second pillar of our project, we investigate how we can utilize immersive virtual reality in training of verbal and nonverbal cues of individuals, and how assuming a different identity in virtual reality can influence individual verbal and nonverbal behavior, as well as implicit bias. By leveraging the "Proteus effect," which changes behavior based on virtual identities, we explore whether embodying successful female role models improves public speaking performance and whether embodying a virtual human of another gender affects nonverbal behavior and implicit gender bias. We aim to study the impact on women’s public speaking performance when embodying a successful female role model, women’s nonverbal behavior when embodying a male virtual human, and examine whether men’s implicit gender bias shifts after embodying a female virtual human.
Research team
