Two Meanings of “Social Skills”: Proposing an Integrative Social Skills Framework

Goal-Directed Social Behavior

Goal-directed social behaviors are behaviors enacted by an Actor in an effort to achieve a social goal. In this way, goal-directed social behavior is simply what the Actor does while pursuing the social goal; it is not the extent to which the Actor’s behavior actually leads to progress toward their goals. Thus, goal-directed social behavior is inclusive of both socially savvy behaviors that help an Actor achieve their social goal and socially awkward behaviors that detract from goal attainment.

There are several social skills-related concepts in the literature that appear to fit within the social behavior element. For example, the concept of impression management (e.g., Bolino & Turnley, 1999; Gardner & Martinko, 1988) has been discussed as behaviors that create desired impressions in others, such as perceptions that one is confident, likable, or intimidating. Additionally, there are sub-components of the broad concept of influence tactics that could be considered goal-directed social behaviors, such as exchange tactics (i.e., making a promise to provide a tangible benefit to someone for complying with request; Yukl & Falbe, 1990) and consultation tactics (i.e., offering decision-making power on a task to encourage participation from another, Clarke & Ward, 2006).

Social Determinants

We define social determinants as the set of malleable, developable, state-like attributes that underlie goal-directed social behavior, including social knowledge, various specific skills, and motivation. In the TJP, Campbell et al. argued determinants of job performance include declarative knowledge (i.e., knowledge of facts), procedural knowledge (i.e., knowing how to do something), skill (i.e., being able to enact the knowledge of how to do something), and motivation. Knowledge, skill, and motivation concepts are likely to exist in the social context as well. Consider something as simple as a handshake. Declarative knowledge would involve knowing that in a professional context you should greet someone you have never met or have not seen in some time with a handshake. Procedural knowledge would be knowledge of how to perform a handshake (e.g., extending your right hand toward the person, thumb up, fingers extended, etc.), while procedural skill would be the extent to which the person can execute their procedural knowledge to engage in a quality handshake.

Kihlstrom and Cantor (2000) discussed the concepts of declarative and procedural social knowledge as well, defining these concepts in a somewhat different manner than would follow from Campbell et al. Specifically, Kihlstrom and Cantor suggested declarative social knowledge involves abstract social concepts and specific memories of social interactions, while procedural social knowledge includes “rules, skills, and strategies by which the person manipulates and transforms declarative knowledge and translates knowledge into action” (p. 575). Other scholars have discussed about the concept of social appropriateness (e.g., Marlowe, 1986; Schneider et al., 1996), which involves a knowledge of appropriate behaviors across different classes of situations and an awareness of social obligations and protocol, and seems quite similar to the notion of social declarative knowledge.

Regarding skills concepts within the determinants element, Klein, DeRouin, & Salas (2006) presented a taxonomy of interpersonal skills. Based on a careful review of the literature, Klein et al. identified 12 skills that were organized into two broad classifications: communication skills and relationship-building skills. More specific skills within the communication classification include active listening, oral communication, written communication, assertive communication, and nonverbal communication. Specific skills within the relationship-building classification include cooperation and coordination, trust, intercultural sensitivity, service orientation, self-presentation, social influence, and conflict resolution and negotiation.

There are also social motivational concepts that would seem to be determinants of social behavior, including, for example, social self-efficacy (Anderson & Betz, 2001) and self-monitoring (Gangestad & Snyder, 2000). These motivational concepts reflect whether a person is motivated to attempt to achieve a particular social goal. For example, social self-efficacy reflects whether an individual believes they are capable of achieving desired social outcomes (Anderson & Betz, 2001). Like other self-efficacy concepts, the belief in one’s capability is often necessary for an individual to take action relevant to a goal (Bandura, 1982).

Social Antecedents

The social antecedents element includes stable individual difference constructs associated with the development and maintenance of the determinants of social behavior. Constructs in this element include social intelligence (Marlowe, 1986), sociability (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1969), social potency (Tellegen & Waller, 2008), extraversion and agreeableness (McCrae & Costa, 1987), social anxiety (Schlenker, & Leary, 1982), and the like.

The TJP suggests that the antecedent constructs have a direct influence on the development and maintenance of the determinant constructs (see also Ackerman, 1996). While we certainly expect that the social skills-related antecedents will influence the development of the social determinants—for example, social intelligence may influence the development of certain goal-specific knowledges and skills associated with perceiving others’ behaviors—we also expect that the antecedent constructs will play a key role in the choice of social goals that an Actor adopts (Judge & Ilies, 2002). For example, individuals high in agreeableness might be more likely to adopt a goal of apologizing to a friend for a mis-step than would someone who is lower on agreeableness.

Perceived Social Effectiveness

We propose that perceived social effectiveness is the extent to which an Actor evaluates the influence of their behavior on an Other as good or bad, effective or ineffective. That is, the Actor considers the Other’s response to their behavior and evaluates the extent to which the Other has been influenced toward the Actor’s goal. Note that defining effectiveness in this way is a departure from the way it is defined in the TJP. Within the TJP, job effectiveness is defined as an evaluation by an Other regarding the extent to which an employee’s job performance was good or bad. The fact that job performance can, more or less, be directly observable by the supervisor (or evaluator) and that the supervisor has knowledge about what the job entails makes the supervisor a viable evaluator of job performance. In the social skills context, however, while behavior is observable by others, the intention behind that behavior is not. In other words, the Other does not know the Actor’s social goal, and therefore has no perspective from which to evaluate the Actor’s social behavior as good or bad vis-à-vis that goal. As such, we find it necessary to focus on the Actor’s evaluation rather than that of Others.

The Motivational Aspect of Social Skills Enactment

Motivation theory discusses two aspects of the motivational system: goal setting and goal striving (Kanfer, 1990). While goal setting involves the process of establishing and committing to a goal, goal striving is the process of managing one’s behavior toward the goal or disengaging from the goal. Because we have defined social skills enactment as a striving for social goals, we have grounded this perspective on social skills in a motivational context.

Behaviors as Signals

The definition of reputation offered by Ferris et al. (2003a) suggests that a reputation is formed as Others interact with an Actor, observe the Actor’s behavior, and talk with other Others about the Actor. In line with this perspective, we represent the formation of social skills reputation in our framework as a perceptive process through which Others attend to and interpret an Actor’s social behaviors (see Figure 1). As shown in the figure, we draw a distinction between the social behaviors that are relevant for the social skills enactment process and those for the development of social skills reputation. With regard to the formation of social skills reputation, we expect that any behavior by an Actor in a social context can provide input to the formation of social skills reputation. We recognize that this is a very broad definition of social behavior, but it is necessary as any behavior by an Actor could influence how an Other evaluates the Actor’s social skills. Of course, some social behaviors will be more diagnostic of social skills than others. Zinko et al. (2007; Zinko & Rubin, 2015) suggest that reputations will emerge only when behavior deviates from the norm. In this way, individuals who are of average generosity, for example, do not develop a reputation for their generosity. Rather, people only develop and hold reputations for individuals that are perceived to be unusually generous or unusually stingy. Thus, reputations for social skills will only emerge for those that are perceived to be unusually socially skilled and those that are perceived as unusually socially unskilled. Thus, while we define social behavior here as any social behavior that can influence perceptions of social skills, behaviors that are considered to be highly diagnostic of social skills (or lack thereof) will be given substantially more weight in the determination of social skills reputation than other social behaviors.

Signaling theory offers a foundation for considering how an Actor’s behaviors lead to formation of social skills reputation (Ferris et al., 2003a). Signaling theory describes a mechanism through which two parties resolve information asymmetry (Spence, 2002; Stiglitz, 2002), where one party has information that another party is likely to find of value. This information is conveyed from one party to the other through signals. Signals can be intentional or automatic, represent both positive and negative information (Taj, 2016), and are used to convey information about quality or intent (Stiglitz, 2000). In the context of social interaction, an Actor’s behaviors can be signals about the extent to which they are socially skilled.

Signaling behaviors can take many forms. Early work by Ekman (1957) proposed that communication in interpersonal situations can be classified into three categories of behavior: verbal, vocal, and nonverbal. He defined verbal behavior as the “content of an organism’s spoken statements” (p. 141), vocal behavior as the “timbre, pitch, and intensity of a spoken statement” (p. 141), and nonverbal behavior as “body movements of the organism” including “motor expression” (p. 141). These categories convey unique information that shape the receivers’ perception (Nagel, Maurer, & Reinemann, 2012) and have been used extensively in studying interpersonal perception (Burns & Beier, 1973; Ismail, 2019; Jackob, Roessing, & Petersen, 2011; Krauss, Apple, Morency, Wenzel., & Winton, 1981; Nagel et al., 2012). We argue that the behaviors within Ekman’s (1957) theorizing can be equally well described as signals from a signaling theory perspective. Below, we consider what kinds of behaviors within the nonverbal, verbal, and vocal categories may signal social skills.

Interpretation of Signals

Signaling theory maintains that the receiver plays an important role in interpreting signals (Perkins & Hendry, 2005; Srivastava, 2001). This interpretation of signals is what we refer to as the perceptive process. As Others attend to a social skills signals, they will consider that signal in terms of their prior experiences with the Actor, their expectations of the Actor, any stereotypes or biases they hold about the Actor, and any other factor that can influence interpretations of the Actor’s behavior. Thus, it is not simply the signal that informs an Other’s perception of an Actor’s social skills, but rather how that signal is interpreted and understood by the Other.

We identify at least two qualities of signals that are likely to impact perceptions of social skills: genuineness and appropriateness. Genuineness is important because it relates to the perceived intentions of an Actor (Ferris et al., 2005). Perhaps the focus should really be on perceived disingenuousness, where an Other perceives that the Actor is behaving in a way that belies their true intentions. In this case, the Other is likely to perceive that the Actor has an ulterior motive or that the Actor’s behavior is not a genuine reflection of who they are, but an attempt to influence the behavior of the Other. When a signal that might typically convey high social skills is perceived by an Other as disingenuous, the Other is likely to not interpret that signal as indicative of high social skills.

To be seen as indicative of social skill, the behavior also has to be perceived by the Other as appropriate for the setting, length, and quality of relationship between the Other and Actor, and the social context. Appropriateness is interesting because, not only is it held in the eye of the beholder (i.e., some Others will see a behavior as appropriate while others will not), behavior can often be seen as inappropriate for two opposing reasons. Consider eye contact. Both too little and too much eye contact could be taken as signals of low social skills. To be seen as socially skilled, the amount and intensity of eye contact needs to be perceived as just right. The same could be true for a large number of behavioral signals, including gesturing, length of communication, and the disclosure of personal information.

The perceptive process also includes the attributions that an Other makes for the Actor’s behavior. Attribution theory maintains that these explanations can fall along a number of underlying dimensions, with locus of causality, stability, and controllability being the most commonly examined in the literature (Harvey, Madison, Martinko, Crook, & Crook, 2014; Weiner, 1985). With respect to locus of causality, attribution theory suggests that under certain conditions, individuals will make internal attributions for an Actor’s behavior, seeing the behavior as a function of the Actor’s personality or an expression of who they are as a person (Jones & Davis, 1965; Kelley, 1973; Weiner, 1985). Under different conditions, however, individuals will make external attributions for an Actor’s behavior, seeing the behavior as a function of the situation to a greater degree than a function of who the Actor is as a person. An Actor’s behavior is only likely to influence an Other’s perception of the Actor’s social skills when the Other makes an internal attribution for the behavior.

Attributions about stability involve the perceived consistency of Actors’ behavior and are typically considered in combination with causality attributions (Harvey et al., 2014). Others should make attributions about Actor’s social skills when Actor’s behaviors are deemed to be caused by stable attributes of the Actor (i.e., locus of causality is internal and behaviors are judged to be consistent over time). However, Others should be less likely to make judgments about Actor’s social skills when the Actor’s behaviors are judged to have either stable or unstable external causes or when behavior can be attributed to unstable qualities of Actors. Finally, perceptions of the controllability of outcomes also play a role in the attribution process. In relation to social skills, if Others perceive that Actor’s outcomes were controllable (e.g., due to effort or ability), Others should make attributions about Actor’s social skills, whereas if Others perceive that the Actor lacked control over outcomes (e.g., outcomes were caused by luck or task difficulty), Others should be less likely to use this information to make judgments about Actor’s social skills (Harvey et al., 2014).

Outcomes of Social Skill Reputation

Based on a comprehensive review of the literature on personal reputation, Ferris et al. (2003a) concluded that reputation has value. They went on to argue that that value comes from the fact that a reputation allows Others to make predictions about an Actor’s future behavior. In this way, the presence of the reputation elicits trust (Belkin & Rothman, 2017; Tyler & Kramer, 1996), as Others come to trust how an Actor will behave within certain situational contexts.

There are likely to be positive workplace outcomes for individuals who have a reputation for being socially skilled. Perceptions of applicant social skills can have an influence as early as organizational entry. For instance, Schuler and Funke (1989) had observers watch a set of interviews for a bank teller position. Observer ratings of the applicants’ social skills correlated .60 with interviewer ratings of applicant performance. In fact, social skills are frequently assessed in employment interviews and have been shown to be predictive of subsequent job performance (Huffcutt, Conway, Roth, & Stone, 2001). Thus, although the perceptions of social skills evaluated in interview contexts research do not meet the threshold of social skills reputation (they are more perceptions than reputation at this point), the findings clearly highlight how perceptions of others’s social skills can influence organizational entry and be related to later evaluations of job performance (see also Blickle et al., 2011; Zingoni, 2015).

Having a reputation for being socially skilled is likely most beneficial in jobs that involve strong interpersonal demands, such as conflict management, influence, negotiation, or networking. In roles that involve such interpersonal demands, Actors with strong reputations for being socially skilled are likely to receive strong performance evaluations from their supervisors (Zinko et al., 2007). This may be explained by cognitive heuristics that supervisors use when making performance evaluations. That is, once a manager comes to view an employee as having social skills, that manager will attend to and remember instances where the employee behaved in a socially skilled manner and ignore or discount behaviors that are not particularly socially skilled (i.e., confirmation bias; Nickerson, 1998).

Interpersonal demands are also common in both leadership (Yukl, 2012) and team contexts (Morgeson, Reider, & Campion, 2005). Actors with a reputation for social skills are likely to be seen as team members who can move a team forward or navigate interpersonal issues that arise between team members. With regard to leadership, Actors with a reputation for being socially skilled may tend to emerge as leaders or be selected into leadership roles (e.g., Ensari, Riggio, Christian, & Carslaw, 2011), and be seen as better at networking and influencing others (Douglas & Ammeter, 2004).

Recommendation #1: Locate Concepts in the Elements of the SSF

As previously discussed, a large number of social skills-related concepts have been proposed and investigated in the literature. An advantage of the SSF is that it provides an organizing structure into which these extant concepts can be located. However, careful consideration of each concept’s conceptual definition needs to be conducted prior to locating them within the SSF to ensure it they are clearly defined as a particular concept type and that the definition does not conflate two or more concept types. Concepts also need to be examined empirically to ensure that measures of the concepts support the inferences associated with the identified concept type. For example, repeated assessments of concepts defined as personality characteristics should be found to correlate quite highly, even over fairly long periods of time, since personality characteristics are defined as being stable over time.

Not all concepts in the literature will fit neatly into one of the SSF elements, as some concepts suffer from conflation of concepts. Consider a definition of social intelligence offered by Marlowe (1986): “the ability to understand the feelings, thoughts, and behaviors of persons, including oneself, in interpersonal situations and to act appropriately upon that understanding” (p. 52). Clearly, based on the name of the concept and the first part of its definition, social intelligence is conceptualized as an ability, and, as such, belongs in the antecedent element of the SSF. However, the latter portion of the definition (i.e., “to act appropriately on that understanding”) conflates the ability with the behavior that is expected to result from that ability. Concepts which conflate concept types will need to be conceptually clarified or left out of the SSF. ¹

For other concepts, it is unclear as to which SSF element they should best be located. For example, it is unclear whether concepts related to the display of emotions, the control of one’s emotions, and the recognition and interpretation of others’ emotions (Saarni, 1999; Satterfield & Hughes, 2007) are best considered abilities or skills. To be considered skills, and therefore located in the determinant element, these concepts would need to be shown to be changeable (through practice or training) over time. If these attributes prove not to be changeable, and, instead, are more innate, then they would need to be conceptualized as ability concepts within the antecedent element.

Some concepts are defined too broadly to fit into the SSF directly. Political skill is a good example of such a concept. Although it is often operationalized as a single political skill score in empirical research, Ferris, Perrewé, Anthony, and Gilmore (2003b) acknowledge that political skill is an “interpersonal style construct” that combines more specific concepts into the broader political skill concept. Ferris et al. (2005) identified four components of political skill: social astuteness, interpersonal influence, networking ability, and apparent sincerity. While political skill itself is too broad to be located within the SSF, the more specifically defined concepts can be located within the framework (though there is some lack of clarity about where they might best be located). Social astuteness, which is associated with an Actor’s capability to understand their own and Others’ behavior as well as having a sensitivity to social settings, is either a skill concept (a determinant) or an ability concept (an antecedent) depending, at least in part, on the expected stability of the attribute. Interpersonal influence, which involves “adapting and calibrating” (Ferris et al., 2005, p. 129) one’s behavior in order to elicit desired responses from others, is likely a skill, and can therefore be located within the determinants element. Ferris et al. articulate that people high in networking ability are “adept at developing and using diverse networks of people” and that they “easily develop friendships and build strong, beneficial alliances and coalitions” (p. 129). Although referred to as an ability, this component might best be characterized as a personality characteristic (an antecedent). Finally, apparent sincerity is the extent to which an actor behaves in a way that gives the impression that they are acting with “integrity, authenticity, sincerity, and genuineness” (Ferris et al., 2005, p. 129). This characteristic is interesting. If it represents a capability to act in a manner that conceals one’s emotions or intentions, then it is probably a skill concept. However, given that the extent to which a person appears to others as sincere or genuine is something to be determined by others, this concept could also be considered an outcome of social behavior.

Recommendation #2: Address Issues of Concept Redundancy

As is well known, the principle of parsimony suggests simpler theories are to be preferred to complex theories (Schmidt, 2010). The large number of concepts within the social skills literature suggests there may be concept redundancy among the set of concepts. Unfortunately, thorough considerations of concept redundancy—which should be undertaken any time new concepts are proposed (Newman, Harrison, Carpenter, & Rariden, 2016)—have not occurred regularly with the proposal of new social skill-related concepts. Thus, in accordance with the principle of parsimony, concepts that are determined to fall within a particular element of the SSF should be scrutinized for concept redundancy. This scrutiny should be done at both the concept and the measurement levels.

At the concept level, the search for concept redundancy is likely to be quite difficult, if for no other reason than that there are so many concepts. Identifying conceptual redundancy typically involves qualitatively analyzing definitions by hand to detect areas of overlap (Podsakoff et al., 2016). However, the large number of concepts means there are also a large number of conceptual definitions. Identifying overlap among dozens of concepts that have been studied for quite some time is likely too large and complex for traditional qualitative forms of analysis. When a body of text becomes too difficult for people to analyze on their own, machine learning offers a strong alternative (Hayashi, Kryściński, McCann, Rajani, & Xiong, 2020). Analyzing the collective conceptual domain of the social skills-related concepts could benefit from a machine learning approach. Topic modeling reduces the dimensionality of large bodies of text without the need for pre-modeling annotations (Hannigan et al., 2019). The technique can identify emergent clusters of ideas (i.e., topics) that are commonly found in the text. Similar to thematic analysis, topic modeling could be used to detect whether certain attributes, such as being able to understand Others’ intentions, are common across definitions of multiple concepts, providing evidence of redundancy. The topics found in the collective conceptual text could be used to generate definitions for a set of core, non-overlapping concepts.

Concepts also need to be distinguished empirically. Of course, data could be collected using measures for a particular set of social skill-related concepts and the relationships between those measures evaluated. Alternatively, or in addition, estimates of the relationships between concepts could be generated using meta-analytic techniques. However, it must be recognized that existing measures were designed from existing conceptual definitions. If the definitions suffer from a lack of clarity or conflation, then it is likely that the measures will also, in some ways, be deficient. Thus, care would need to be taken when interpreting relationships between measures when one or more of the measures represents a concept that suffers from a lack of conceptual clarity.

Taken together, the work of Recommendations 1 and 2 would result in a core set of social skills concepts that would be non-redundant and that would not suffer from conflation of concepts. The identification of such a core set of concepts would be very beneficial for the literature, as it would facilitate the construction of strong theories about the relationships between the concepts and how they work together to influence the setting of social goals, social behavior, and the social goal-related self-regulatory process.

Recommendation #3: Managing Multiple Social Goals

In our consideration of social goals, and in line with the distinction between getting along and getting ahead from Hogan’s (1983) socioanalytic theory and between the notions of agency and communion (see Abele & Wojciszke, 2014), we argue that there are likely two key classes of social goals related to the social skills domain, those associated with influencing others and those associated with relations with others. Undoubtedly, individuals will pursue multiple social goals at the same time in many, if not most, social contexts. Research should look at how people set, manage, and prioritize multiple, simultaneous social goals.

One particularly interesting case to study would be when a person’s social goals come into conflict with one another. For example, an Actor may have a strong goal to influence an Other to act in a certain way but, at the same time, hold an equally strong goal for that Other to maintain an affection for them. Behaving in a way that would facilitate achievement of the influence goal could be an impediment to achieving the relational goal. We expect that such situations could be perceived as quite stressful, depending on the salience and importance of the two goals. Research to understand how people prioritize their goals in these situations or how they select behaviors that forward progress to one of the goals while doing as little harm to the other goal as possible could be very interesting. Finding ways to achieve these conflicting goals may be at the heart of what is typically thought of as social skills. That is, perhaps perceiving an Actor as being able to influence Others while the Others continue to hold the Actor in high regard results in particularly high levels of social skills reputation for the Actor.

Recommendation #4: Identify Attributes Associated with Social Skills Enactment

The social skills enactment aspect of the SSF is meant to be general, such that the four elements (i.e., antecedents, determinants, behavior, and social effectiveness) will be involved in the pursuit of any social goal. However, which specific concepts within those elements are most influential on social behavior will differ based on the nature of the Actor’s social goal. Consider, for example, the goals of making a good first impression and getting a friend to accept an apology. The personality characteristics of sociability and agreeableness are two attributes that fall within the antecedent element of the theory. However, sociability is likely more relevant to enacting behaviors related to making a good first impression than to apologizing to a friend. In contrast, agreeableness may be more important to enacting behaviors associated with successfully apologizing to a friend. The same would be true for concepts in the determinant element; knowledge and skill concepts would be more or less influential on social behavior depending on the nature of the goal.

Although the specific antecedent and determinant concepts that drive social behavior are likely to change across social goals, it is also possible that there are some key antecedent and/or determinant concepts associated with success across a wide range of social goals. Such a finding would be analogous to the finding that the personality characteristic of conscientiousness is related to successful performance in most jobs. The identification of a core set of attributes associated with success across a range of social goals could be quite valuable in the organizational context, with potential applications for selection and for development.

Recommendation #5: Investigate the Social Self-Regulatory Process

We have proposed that social skills enactment can be approached from a self-regulatory perspective, by which people, in an ongoing manner, monitor and evaluate progress toward their social goals. This is a key premise of the framework that needs to be carefully evaluated empirically. However, designing research to evaluate this dynamic process is likely to be difficult. A goal-oriented situation could be established in a lab setting where two or more participants are encouraged to interact in pursuit of social goals provided to them by the researchers. The problem with such an approach is that as soon as the researcher interrupts the interaction to ask the participants about their perceptions of their progress toward their goal and/or about how they have been influenced by the behaviors of the other participants, it will be hard to have them continue the interaction as the assessment process would certainly affect subsequent interactions. Thus, we may get good information about a particular point in the self-regulatory process, but not information about the process as a whole, as it plays out over time.

Another option to study this process could be neuroimaging, as brain activity can be monitored relatively unobtrusively as a task unfolds in real-time (Waldman, Wang, & Fenters, 2019). While still very nascent in the organizational sciences, neuroimaging is beginning to be used to study social-cognitive processes relevant to organizational functioning (e.g., neural engagement was found to be associated with leader emergence; Waldman, Wang, Stikic, Berka, & Korszen, 2015). The field of neuroscience also provides some insight about which brain regions are involved in self-regulation during social interaction (Heatherton, 2011). Distinct brain regions are thought to be responsible for recognizing social norms and contexts, having awareness of one’s own behavior, assessing others’ reactions, controlling inappropriate impulses, and planning and initiating behaviors. Knowledge of these areas often comes from studying patients with brain damage (Wagner, Demos, & Heatherton, 2015) or mapping the brain activity of one brain at a time (Healey & Hodgkinson, 2014). However, “hyperscanning” is a newer technique that is used to measure the activity of multiple brains simultaneously (see Czeszumski et al., 2020 for a review). Future research could apply techniques, such as hyperscanning, to identify the neurological patterns of interpersonal dynamics involved in social self-regulation and how different types of brain activity relate to outcomes such as goal attainment.

Recommendation #6: Identify Key Social Skill Signals

The SSF proposes that an Actor’s behaviors serve as signals to Others about the extent to which the Actor is socially skilled. We suggested that there are likely to be three broad classes of behavioral signals: nonverbal, verbal, and vocal. It is, of course, likely that some behaviors will be much stronger signals of social skills than others. Research to identify behaviors that are heavily weighted in the formation and maintenance of an Actor’s social skills reputation would be exceedingly helpful for advancing the literature. It will be interesting to consider both signals that suggest to Others that an Actor is socially skilled and signals that suggest the Actor lacks social skills. Given research showing that negative information often has a greater impact on evaluations than others than does positive information (e.g., Ito, Larsen, Smith, & Cacioppo, 1998), we suspect that there may be a wider array of behaviors that signal a lack of social skills than there are behaviors that signal that an Actor is socially skilled.

Signals are likely to involve more than just enacting the behavior. Some research has examined frequencies of behavior (e.g., number of head nods) (Peeters & Lievens, 2006) or even self-report of behaviors (e.g. “I smiled a lot”) (Higgins & Judge, 2004; Kristof-Brown et al., 2002). We expect that behavioral signals are likely to be more complex than just whether someone engaged in a particular behavior. There are likely a number of details that factor into how the relevant behaviors are executed that will influence Others' general perceptions of an Actor’s social skills (Ferris et al., 2003b). As we discussed previously, we expect factors such as the extent to which the Actor’s behavior is seen as genuine (and not serving an ulterior motive; see Ferris et al., 2005) and/or is appropriate for the situation will be key factors in evaluations of social skills reputation. It’s not just that an Actor smiled in an interaction with Others, it is how they smiled, when they smiled, and the genuineness of the smile that likely matter in influencing social skills reputation.

Recommendation #7: Identify Social Skills Signals within Situational Contexts

Additionally, there are likely to be key situational contexts where Others are particularly attentive to Actors’ behaviors with regard to judgments about the Actors’ social skills. For example, an Actor’s behaviors in a tense, conflict-laden work meeting are likely to be more diagnostic of social skills for Others than the Actor’s behaviors in a less conflict-laden meeting. Developing a representation of the kinds of situational contexts in which Others tend to pay more attention to behavioral signals and give them greater weight in their judgments of social skills reputation would be valuable for refining the SSF.

Recommendation #8: Identify the Potential for Bias in Social Skills Evaluations

Research has shown that perceptive processes are subject to a wide variety of biases (e.g., performance appraisal; Bellé, Cantarelli, & Belardinelli, 2017; Cook, 1995; Curtis, Harvey, & Ravden, 2005). As a perception, it is very likely that there are factors that will influence how Others determine social skills reputations. For example, an attractive Actor who engages in awkward or slightly inappropriate behavior might be seen as more socially skilled than a less attractive Actor who engages in the same behavior. There are likely a wide range of attributes of the Actor or the Other that might bias the perceptive process, including race, gender, and age. To the extent that such biases influence perceptions of the Actor’s social skills, and to the extent that those social skill perceptions are related to important outcomes, then the perceptive biases could carry down the line and influence those organizational outcomes. For example, if men and women engage in the same behaviors but are perceived differently in terms of their social skills reputations, then that bias could lead to differences in men and women being selected for leadership roles and/or being seen as successful in those roles (Banks, Fischer, Gooty, & Stock, 2021a). Research on the potential biases in the establishment and maintenance of social skills reputation would be very informative.

Recommendation #9: Examine the Consistency of Social Skills Reputation Evaluations Across Observers

Social skills reputation largely lies in the eyes of the beholders. Even if Others have the same interactions with an Actor (i.e., they observe the same behavioral signals), they may perceive and react to the Actor’s behavioral signals quite differently. For instance, one Other might perceive the Actor’s behavior as awkward, while another Other may perceive it as appropriate. Thus, variation among Others in perceptions of an Actor’s social skills reputation is to be expected. However, to be considered a reputation, there must be some level of consistency in the perception across Others (Zinko et al., 2007). But, reputations can be group specific. An Actor could have a positive reputation for social skills among colleagues at work, but no such reputation among friends. These group differences could emerge as groups have different opportunities to observe the Actor across different social contexts. Yet, if there are a set of individual difference concepts (of the Actor) that are related to the development of social skills reputation, then social skills reputation might tend to generalize across diverse groups of Others.

A key implication here for research on social skills reputation is that Others are nested within groups which are nested within Actors. As such, variance between the Others and the groups of Others will need to be accounted for in the study of social skills reputation. Research examining social skills reputation—such as the relationship between an Actor’s social skill reputation and work-related outcomes—will need to be evaluated using multi-level data analytic techniques. Also of interest is factors lead to variance in social skills reputations of an Actor within a group of Others.

Recommendation #10: Examine Self-Evaluations of Social Skills Reputation

Although we have talked about social skills reputations held by Others throughout this paper, Actors will also certainly hold social skills perceptions about themselves as well. It will be interesting to look at the degree of correspondence between self- and other-perceptions of social skills. Connolly, Kavanagh, and Viswesvaran (2007) conducted a meta-analysis of self- and other-ratings of the Big Five personality characteristics, finding corrected correlations in the range of .46–.62. While these correlations are strong, they also suggest that there is considerable unique variance between self-ratings and other-ratings. Exploring that unique variance McAbee and Connelly (2016) showed that self- and other-ratings of personality characteristic could be broken down into three key sources of variance, that due to the attribute, that due to the self (which they referred to as identify) and that due to others (which they referred to as reputation). Of course, the Big Five traits are attributes that are believed to be stable constructs. For something like social skills reputation, where we assert that there is not an underlying psychological construct, the correlation between self-evaluations of social skill reputation and assessments of reputation made by others are likely to correlate less strongly than personality traits.

Studying the consequences of discordant self- and other-ratings of social skill reputation could be important theoretically and practically. Recent research on imposter syndrome (a belief that Others overestimate one’s abilities) provides some clues as to what misalignment could mean, particularly when people hold more critical perceptions of their own capabilities. Tewfik (2021), for example, found people with imposter syndrome were seen to be particularly socially skilled. While imposter syndrome is a more general form of self-doubt, it could be valuable to study whether undervaluing one’s own social skills reputation plays a similar role in social skills enactment, as it might relate to social self-efficacy, and to broader work-related outcomes, such as leadership or effectiveness in conflict situations. We would anticipate a host of potentially negative interpersonal outcomes for individuals who have higher perceptions of their own social skills than those held by others. These individuals, perceiving themselves as socially skilled, may continue to seek to influence others, while those others, who perceive them as having lower levels of social skills, may put up barriers to that influence.

Recommendation #11: The Role of Time in the Reputation-Outcome Relationship

We expect that people can and do form social skills reputations in rather short interactions with people they don’t know well. These evaluations are likely to be quite unstable, however. As Others observe and interpret more social skills signals from an Actor, we expect that these evaluations will become rather crystallized. The crystallization process is likely to be a function of the number of social skills signals observed and the salience of those signals. In other words, crystallization could happen fairly quickly if the Other observes the Actor in a highly social skills-salient situation (i.e., where the signals would be expected to be highly diagnostic of social skills). In less social skills diagnostic situations, Others may require a larger number of signals before their evaluations crystallize.

Research into the development and stability of social skills reputation is important because it is likely that evaluations of social skills reputation need to crystallize before the reputation begins to influence other outcomes. For instance, consider that an Other who has had limited interaction with an Actor, but has developed a sense that the Actor may be socially skilled—that is, a positive but un-crystallized social skill reputation for the Actor. Under these conditions, the Other is not likely to use that evaluation of social skills reputation to draw firm conclusions about the Actor in terms of potential for leadership or desire to have the Actor as a team member. Once social skills reputation becomes more crystallized, however, then the Other becomes increasingly likely to consider social skills reputation when making key organizationally-relevant evaluations of the Actor.

The exception to this thinking is when a decision has to be made about the Actor in low information contexts. A key example of this would be a talent acquisition context. In such cases, where a decision needs to be made based on a limited amount of information about the applicants, un-crystallized evaluations of social skills reputation are likely to play an important role in making the decision.