Can Confidence Influence Persuasiveness in Disagreements by Conveying Competence versus Dominance? The Moderating Role of Competitiveness

Rees, L. & Tsai, M. & Kopelman, S. & Hu, H., (2024) “Can Confidence Influence Persuasiveness in Disagreements by Conveying Competence versus Dominance? The Moderating Role of Competitiveness”, Negotiation and Conflict Management Research 17(2), 153-181. Research has demonstrated that confident individuals gain social influence because their confidence signals competence rather than dominance in settings in which they do not experience a disagreement with others. We extend this research by exploring felt competitiveness, as reflected by perceptions of goal opposition between perceivers and others. In settings where people experience a disagreement, we explore the impact of felt competitiveness on the association between expressed confidence and social perceptions of the expresser’s competence and dominance, and how these shape persuasiveness. We conducted a field study examining dyadic interactions between coworkers (Study 1) and two experiments manipulating competitiveness and confidence (Studies 2-3).Results showed that high competitiveness neutralizes the positive association between expressed confidence and perceived competence, thus eliminating the positive indirect effect of expressed confidence on persuasiveness. Results also demonstrated a stronger positive association between expressed confidence and perceived dominance when competitiveness is higher. However, perceived dominance did not consistently predict persuasiveness, suggesting that the dominance results should be interpreted with caution. Overall, our findings offer novel implications regarding how the social influence processes of confidence expressions are shaped by felt competitiveness.Laura Rees ([email protected]) is an Associate Professor of Organizational Behavior at the College of Business, Oregon State University. Her research focuses on the complexity, nuance, and often counterintuitive nature of emotions and related cognitive and interpersonal experiences and their consequences for decision-making, judgment, perception, persuasion and negotiation, performance, and well-being at work.Dr. Ming-Hong Tsai is an Associate Professor of Psychology in the School of Social Sciences at Singapore Management University. His research focuses on judgment and decision-making, conflict and collaboration, and emotions. He has published papers in journals such as Organization Science, Journal of Organizational Behavior, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, Journal of Personality, British Journal of Psychology, Journal of Business and Psychology, and Negotiation and Conflict Management Research.