What Is Your Communication Style?
How much you talk, how exactly, how sharply, how curiously and how much it shows
Most descriptions of communication style are one-word labels. Dutch researchers took a more careful route: they collected the words people use to describe how others talk, grouped them statistically, and found six broad behavioural styles. Five of them are here - how expressive you are, how precise, how verbally aggressive, how much you question and debate, and how much your emotions show in your voice. You get a bar for each rather than a single label, because people mix them.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you usually talk in everyday conversations with people you know reasonably well - not in your best meeting or your worst argument.
What it measures
Five of the six domains of the Communication Styles Inventory: expressiveness, preciseness, verbal aggressiveness, questioningness and emotionality. It describes how you talk, not how you listen or how you handle conflict - Quinthea has separate tests for listening style, conflict style and assertiveness.
Based on: Communication Styles Inventory (de Vries, Bakker-Pieper, Konings & Schouten, 2013)
Possible results
Expressiveness
How much you talk, take the floor and bring energy to a conversation.
Preciseness
How structured, concise and clear you are when you explain something.
Verbal aggressiveness
How blunt, cutting or domineering you get when you disagree or are annoyed.
Questioningness
How much you ask why, explore ideas and enjoy a good debate.
Emotionality
How much your feelings, nerves and moods show when you talk.
Common questions
Is communication style just personality?
Largely, but not entirely. The researchers found medium to strong links between these styles and the big personality traits overall. But communication style describes behaviour you can observe and change, while personality is broader. You can keep your temperament and still learn to be more precise or less cutting.
Is being blunt the same as being assertive?
No. Assertiveness means stating what you think and need clearly while respecting the other person. Verbal aggressiveness, as measured here, adds an edge - anger, belittling or domineering - that attacks the person rather than the point. You can be very direct and score low on this bar; the difference is in how the other person feels afterwards.
Which communication style makes the best leader?
In a study by the same research group, 279 employees rated their managers. Supportiveness, assuredness and above all preciseness stood out: a manager's preciseness predicted how well they were seen to perform and how satisfied their team was, even after accounting for leadership style. Being talkative and being effective, in other words, are not the same thing.
Sources
- de Vries, R. E., Bakker-Pieper, A., Konings, F. E., & Schouten, B. (2013). The Communication Styles Inventory (CSI): A six-dimensional behavioral model of communication styles and its relation with personality. Communication Research. doi:10.1177/0093650211413571
- de Vries, R. E., Bakker-Pieper, A., & Oostenveld, W. (2010). Leadership = communication? The relations of leaders' communication styles with leadership styles, knowledge sharing and leadership outcomes. Journal of Business and Psychology. doi:10.1007/s10869-009-9140-2
An honest note The items are Quinthea's own wording adapted from the Communication Styles Inventory, so scores are not comparable to its published norms. The inventory was developed with Dutch samples, and what counts as blunt or expressive varies between cultures. It has six domains; impression manipulativeness is left out here. How you think you talk and how others hear you can differ, so asking someone who knows you well is a useful check.