Agentic and Communal Cues for Empowerment (ACE)
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" in the scope of the project Agentic and Communal Cues for Empowerment (ACE I) aims to empower managerial communication and training through (a) leveraging agentic and communal verbal cues and (b) investigating training using immersive virtual reality. The continuation of the project (ACE II) focuses on situations when female managers communicate in situations with neutral or negative valence, such as situations when giving negative feedback.
In the first pillar of our project ACEI, 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 ACEI, Embodiment in Virtual Reality, 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.
Building on ACE I, the continuation project ACE II focuses on managerial communication in neutral and negative contexts, such as giving negative feedback or communicating difficult decisions. We examine whether combining agentic and communal verbal and nonverbal cues remains effective for female managers in these more challenging situations, where stereotypical expectations, harsher evaluations, and backlash risks may be especially salient. In doing so, ACE II aims to broaden our understanding of effective communication strategies for female leaders across situational contexts. At the same time, we extend our virtual reality training approach by integrating behavioral measures such as eye-tracking in collaboration with the Heilbronn Extended Reality Lab. This enables us to generate richer behavioral insights and to further develop evidence-based training interventions that empower female professionals in complex managerial interactions.
Research team (ACE I)
Research team (ACE II)
