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This study investigates how conflict strategies and communicator gender affect two properties of communicative competence, appropriateness and effectiveness, and how these properties are associated with interpersonal attraction. In total, 361 participants read one of 12 randomly distributed conflict scripts that operationalized one of three conflict strategies (i.e., integrative, distributive, or avoidance), communicator gender, and episode type (i.e., same- versus opposite-sex situation). The impact of strategy type, gender, and episode on measures of general appropriateness, specific appropriateness, and effectiveness is reported. While all of the competence properties varied due to strategy inductions, specific appropriateness was the most sensitive to strategy differences. In addition, both appropriateness variables correlated strongly, and effectiveness correlated moderately with social and task attraction. Discussion focuses on the implications of the results for communication competence research.
Canary et al. (1987) studied this question.