Nonverbal Behavior, Dominance, and the Basis of Status in Task Groups

Linking nonverbal behavior to influence in task groups has been interpreted as evidence that behavioral dominance is the basis of status. Challenging this interpretation, this paper proposes that both the power processes that underlie status formation and the structural implications of dominance hierarchies indicate that expectations about task performance will be the usual basis of status in task groups. Furthermore, while some nonverbal behavior communicates dominance, it is not linked to influence. Influence results from nonverbal task cues that affect the performance expectations of an actor. An experiment tested this hypothesis by measuring the influence achieved by a female confederate in a three-person female group. As expected, the confederate was most influential when she displayed high-level task cues. When she displayed a high level of dominance cues, the confederate was not more influential than when she displayed submissive or low-task cues. The results suggest that status is a collective product of the entire network of group members, rather than an aggregate of pairwise competitions among members.