2.4. Psychological dominance and subordination

When people meet each other, they unconsciously evaluate each other’s perspectives on communication. The evaluation is based on two parameters: dominance-subordination (DS) and benevo- lence-aggressiveness (BA).

The choice of parameters is not random. They determine a person’s general impression of him or her, his or her social orientation and the place in the structure of interpersonal relations for which a person claims to belong. The positioning of a person in the system of highlighted parameters allows one to understand a great deal about him or her.

Trust and concern, negativism and anxiety are manifestations of the primary characteristics of holistic human behavior.

Psychologists see trust and caring as ways of realising human attachments, while negativism and anxiety are seen as forms of psychological defence.

People who occupy a particular position in interpersonal relations exhibit different psychological characteristics.

Types of psychological dominance

The social role of a leader clearly implies dominance, which can be qualitatively different in its social orientation (Tabl. 2).

Dominance can have different emotional content (connotations): aggressive, negative, caring, benevolent.

Brief characteristics of different types of dominance: competitive, organising, caring, and aggressive are presented in the Tabl. 2.

In modern management, two types of dominance are considered adequate, that is appropriate to the social role of the manager in the competing management environment of the organisation: competing and organising.

Naturally, if there is someone who is dominant, consequently there are also those who are subordinate.

Types of psychological subordination

Subordination can have different emotional content (connotations): aggressive, anxious, trusting, benevolent (Tabl. 3).

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Table 3

A person who has been in a subordinate position for a long time seeks to move up the scale of dominance. But it is impossible to do this directly, head-on, because there are other people in the same positions who are not going to give them up. And there are two possible behaviors for a person seeking to move up the dominance-subordination scale.

The first option is the development of the person, their inner growth. A person develops, gaining self-confidence, which allows him or her to treat other people with more trust and openness and to open “doors” for equal communication. Subsequent transitions from subordination to domination are a matter of time and the person’s own willingness to take a particular social position.

The second option is based on different psychological attitudes. The leading motive is psychological protection from the outside world, from his own self, which he also does not trust. This leads to an underestimation of oneself, and an attempt to hide one’s insecurity. People around him sense this, and he gets what he gives away — distrust, aggression, etc., trapping himself in maladaptive behaviour. If he does manage to break free from subordination, his domination is aggressive in nature, requiring enormous energetic efforts from the person to hold on to it.

Power is not just a complex phenomenon but also a psychologically dangerous one. Power can bring a lot of trouble, including to the bearer of power himself. Psychologists believe that it is not enough to have power, one should be able to manage and dispose of it, and not to have illusions that “if you work well and a lot, everything will work out by itself”.

Summary

1.The manager deals with a world of “hard” structures (production, finance, technology) and “soft” structures (personnel). These structures exist according to their own laws.

2.A manager’s soft skills are time and self-management (thought and speech processes, emotional state), team building and conflict management, influence and motivation.

3.Managerial soft skills are the result of training and coaching.

4.Power as social and psychological phenomenon are subject to different laws.

5.Power has visible (power of position, expert, personality, dependence) and invisible (power of holder of resources, social connections, information) sources.

6.Psychological dominance of an executive may manifest itself in various forms. Two types: competing and organising dominance are adequate for the modern world.

Think about and answer these questions

1.Which skills, hard or soft, are easier to test and assess? Which features of these skills do make them easier to assess?

2.By what attributes can the invisible source of a person’s power be recognised? List these signs.

3.Relate the following forms of psychological dominance (Competing, Organising, Caring, Aggressive) to psychological subordination (Anxious, Benevolent, Aggressive, Trusting).

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3. SPEECH AND EMOTIONAL INFLUENCE

As a result of studying this material, you will learn:

–there are two types of rhetoric: the art of eloquence and the art of persuasion;

–a rhetorical text has three components: logos, pathos, and ethos;

–persuasion as a type of influence has a number of limitations;

–agonal rhetoric includes three additional conditions: psychological, logical and linguistic. Keywords: rhetoric, agonal (adversarial) rhetoric.

3.1. Classical rhetoric

Rhetoric has been known since antiquity. It has developed in two directions: as the art of eloquence (the ability to speak beautifully) and as the art of persuasion.

Aristotle gave a comprehensive answer to the question: “Why rhetoric is necessary?”. He wrote: “If we have even the most exact knowledge, it is still not easy to persuade some people by speaking on the basis of that knowledge, because to appreciate speech based on knowledge is a matter of education, and here [before a crowd] this is impossible. Here we have to conduct our proofs and reasoning in a way that is generally accessible”.

Classical traditional rhetoric emerged as the art of oratory. Aristotle gave a theoretical basis for rhetoric and distinguished three components of a rhetorical text:

–logos or system of logical proofs;

–pathos or the direct expression of the speaker’s feelings about the subject of the statement;

–ethos or the system of correspondences of speech to a certain background of social beliefs. Logos and pathos have not fundamentally changed in the two and a half thousand years that

have followed.

Ethos has changed. Today it has become apparent that there are no moral postulates that are uniquely correct for all times, peoples, social, age and other groups.

Let us briefly consider the logical foundations of persuasion. It is worth recalling that these foundations have remained unchanged for over two thousand years.

The logical foundations of persuasion

It is not easy to get a person to do something. A leader uses different kinds of influence, as you already know. The most recognised form of influence is persuasion. Unfortunately, persuasion as a form of influence is neither universal nor omnipotent. There are a number of limitations to the use of persuasion:

1.“One can only be persuaded by someone who wishes to be persuaded”. If one is unwilling to listen to arguments or simply to listen to the other, there is no force that will compel it.

2.“A great deal of time is spent”. No one can be persuaded the first time. A person needs time to comprehend new information, to compare it with what they already have. Then there is a process of reflection, comparing different options. A person may want to get more information, to postpone making a final decision.

3.“Single information base”. This means that people (who are persuading and who are being persuaded) have the same general or professional knowledge. A mathematician is difficult to persuade a humanist, they have different information bases.

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4.“A single-meaningful understanding of argumentation”. Our words have multiple meanings. First of all, they are polysemous in their meanings. You can see this by looking in any dictionary. In the scientific world it is required to “define the concepts”, that is, to specify in what sense what word will be used. Secondly, words are also endowed with meanings. To understand an argument in the same way, one must not only know the meaning of a word, but also understand the meaning that is put into it.

5.“Insensitivity to reasoning evidence”. Indeed, there are quite a few people who do not accept logical proof. These are poorly educated people. They perceive the person who tries to persuade them with words as weak.

So, it takes a whole range of stimuli for a person to take action.

A person needs to understand why they need to act. If something is very important to a person, but he does not believe it can be done, he will remain inactive.

A person needs to understand the effort he has to make. A person will not start an action if the goal is not worth the effort.

This is why people must be persuaded.

There are different kinds of persuasion: informing and explaining, proving and refuting, arguing. Informing. There are two ways to tell a story. Psychologists believe that if the listener is choleric in temperament, it is better to tell the story from general statements to individual facts (deductive

method). If the listener is phlegmatic, it is better to tell from individual facts to generalisations (inductive method).

Explanation can be instructional (relying on memory) or reasoning (relying on thinking). The techniques of reasoning are attractive to creative people. Such people usually have their own point of view on everything and are used to debate, craving for activity. The reasoning explanation is structured in such a way that the facilitator constantly questions the pros and cons, forcing the interlocutor to think for him or herself.

Proof is built according to the laws of formal logic: the law of identity, the law of contradiction, the law of the excluded third and the law of sufficient reason. The essence of proof is to put forward a thesis (thought, judgement) and look for arguments, facts to confirm it. In scientific practice, having facts is a necessary condition, but not sufficient. Proof does not make a judgement true; it only establishes its truth.

Refutation is of the same nature as proof. To refute a proposition is to prove it false. The opposition of proof and refutation makes sense only in the practice of human life.

A specificity of the humanities, as well as of everyday communication, is the use of so-called unprovable argumentation and incomplete refutation criticism.

Argumentation is the justification (in whole or in part) of a claim using other claims. Arguments assume that the other statements are at least partially justified. All argumentation has two aspects: logical and communicative. These aspects are difficult to separate in reality; they are a single process.

Communicatively, argumentation is a process of communicating (interpreting, suggesting) the information recorded in the thesis of an argument. All argumentation is designed for credibility, which does not come by itself and often requires considerable verbal ingenuity to acquire. People do not always develop beliefs, that is, complete confidence in the truth of a position. Sometimes only an opinion is formed, that is, an incomplete certainty of the truth about a statement. An opinion can also be characterised by a “rigid” fixation.

People use various methods and techniques to convince others of the truth, usefulness, etc., of certain views, ideas and concepts. Among the most used methods is persuasion on the basis of:

– belief and suggestion, which are the most common in everyday life;

– by reasoning, which is a prerequisite for accepted scientific reasoning.

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