Persuasive Self-Efficacy: Dispositional and Situational Correlates

Abstract

People vary in their self-efficacy as persuaders. After devising a brief measure of persuasive self-efficacy, we find that the construct correlates positively with a number of variables relevant to social interaction, including self-esteem, self-monitoring, extroversion, and openness to new experiences, and negatively with other variables, including communication apprehension and neuroticism. Social self-efficacy had a modest but significant relationship with persuasive self-efficacy. Drawing from research on contextual self-efficacy, we also examine some of the social situations where persuasive self-efficacy may matter and find that people vary in their self-efficacy as a persuader as a function of the context.

Keywords:

• Communication
• Persuasion
• Self-Efficacy

Notes

[1] Self-efficacy research finds that males generally report slightly higher self-efficacy than females in a variety of domains, including academic work (Huang, 2013; Pajares, 1997;),health management (Wangberg, 2008), and negotiation (Stevens, Bavetta, & Gist, 1993). Given this, we did a post hoc analysis to see if the difference was so with persuasiveness self-efficacy. There was a significant difference between males and females in their self-efficacy as persuaders, t(424) = −2.30, p < .05, Cohen’s d = .24. Males (M = 4.01, SD = .59) perceived themselves as slightly but statistically significantly more persuasive than females (M = 3.88, SD = .56). For the contexts for persuasion, females (M = 2.59, SD = .66) had a significantly lower, t(426) = −4.15, p < .001, Cohen’s d = .42, mean on challenging situation than males (M = 2.87, SD = .61). The same was true for task-formality, t(426) = −4.36, p < .001, Cohen’s d = .45 (Female M = 3.36, SD = .78; Male M = 3.69, SD = .67), and informal-intimate, t(426) = −2.13, p < .05, Cohen’s d = .21 (Female M = 4.11, SD = .59; Male M = 4.23, SD = .54), situations.

[2] We assessed the potential consequences of collinearity among our variables. First, we computed a multiple regression with persuasive self-efficacy as the criterion variable and the various personality variables as predictors. Indicators of multicollinearity showed little cause for concern: Variance inflation factor (VIF) scores for each predictor were relatively small, less than 2.0, except for the VIF associated with extroversion (2.11), and none of the tolerances was less than .48 (Hair, Black, Babin, Anderson, & Tatham, 2005). Second, we computed a series of two-step multiple regressions. For each, persuasive self-efficacy was the criterion, and we included all the personality variables except one in the first step. We entered the excluded variable in the second step. We found significant changes in R² for openness, extroversion, self-monitoring, self-esteem, and communication apprehension. There was no significant improvement in R² for conscientiousness, neuroticism, openness to new experience, or agreeableness. Regardless of our analyses, it is important to recognize that in studies where relationships among personality dispositions are examined, there are often correlations among the variables.