A Study Of Conflict Talk At The Workplace In The Newsroom From The Perspective Of Rapport Management Theory

The way people use language affects their relationships,and interpersonal communication involves the management of social relationships.As a universal social language phenomenon,conflict talk has a great influence on interpersonal communication and interpersonal relationships.The effective management of conflict talk can maintain and enhance interpersonal relationships.However,if people take inappropriate management of conflict talk,interpersonal relationships will be weakened or damaged.Over the past years,many scholars have investigated conflict talk from the perspectives of cross-cultural communication,anthropology,sociology,and conversation analysis.However,the dynamic process of conflict talk is rarely explored.Conflict talk is also an inevitable social phenomenon of employees in the workplace.Due to the universality and complexity of conflict talk,employees need to deal with it properly to solve interpersonal disputes and maintain the harmonious interpersonal relations at the workplace.Based on the rapport management theory proposed by Spencer-Oatey,this study analyzes the conflict talk clips at the workplace and presents the dynamic process of conflict talk at the workplace.This study explores the response strategies and termination strategies applied by the interlocutors to respond to conflict talk,and it finally provides enlightenment for the rapport management of employees.The corpus employed in this study is collected from the American TV series The Newsroom,which introduces the daily work and life of TV journalists.The plots of the series contain numerous conflict talk clips at the workplace.In this study,a total of 43 conflict talk dialogue segments are collected,and both qualitative and quantitative research approaches are utilized in order to investigate the three research questions:First,by threatening face and sociality rights,how do interlocutors provoke conflict talk?Second,how do interlocutors adopt response strategies to cope with conflict talk and manage interpersonal relationships?What are the factors that influence the use of the response strategies?Third,what kind of rapport management outcomes can be reached by adopting termination strategies of conflict talk?This study draws following conclusions:Firstly,interlocutors will pose threat to listener by violating face and sociality rights and cause conflict talk.Among them,identity face and equity rights of the listener are mostly threatened by interlocutors.Secondly,in the development phase of conflict talk,interlocutors will adopt 12 aggravated response strategies and 4 mitigating response strategies to maintain face and sociality rights.In workplace environment,the interlocutors at the workplace will mostly adopt aggravated response strategy to maintain their face and sociality rights and manage the workplace interpersonal rapport.Among the aggravated response strategies,questions and irony account for the highest proportion.Both of them are employed to express personal statements directly and vent dissatisfaction and doubts.Among the mitigating response strategies,explanation,as a speech act to eliminate differences and promote mutual understanding,appears most frequently.Explanation is helpful to maintain face and sociality rights among the interlocutors.Subject to the influence of contextual variables,pragmatic conventions and rapport orientations,the response strategies of conflict talk will change with the dynamic changes of these three factors.Therefore,the development of conflict talk is a dynamic process.In interpersonal communication,rapport orientations held by interlocutors will affect the use of response strategies to a large degree.Meanwhile,interlocutors should also comprehensively consider the dynamic process of contextual variables and pragmatic conventions,and choose appropriate ways to manage harmonious relationships.Thirdly,in the termination phase of the conflict talk,the interlocutors will adopt eight strategies to terminate the conflict talk and manage the interpersonal relationships.Among the eight termination strategies,withdrawal and submission account for higher proportion.Interlocutor’s withdrawal will directly terminate the conflict talk.However,this strategy is not conducive to resolving the conflict and building a harmonious interpersonal relationship.While submission is the strategy in that one party is subject to the other party’s statement.Submission will mitigate the conflict talk to a large extent and maintain interpersonal rapport.These two termination strategies will cause two rapport management outcomes,namely,reduced rapport and maintained rapport.Theoretically,the findings of this study verify the feasibility of rapport management theory in analyzing conflict talk at the workplace,promote further exploration and research on the dynamic process of conflict talk at the workplace,and enrich the research content of conflict talk at the workplace.Practically,this study is useful for interlocutors at the workplace to understand the triggering factors and response strategies of conflict talk at the workplace.Interlocutors should realize that conflict talk originates from people’s pursuit of face and sociality rights.Therefore,in interpersonal communication,interlocutors should pay attention to avoid that his behavior threatens the face and sociality rights of the other party.This study can guide people to appropriately deal with conflict talk at the workplace and build a harmonious and genial interpersonal relationship.