Effects of goal framing in encouraging utterance on recipients’ cognition, affects, and motivation for action

Abstract

There are multiple expressions of utterance to encourage a certain action from a socially superior person to a subordinate one. The types of expression may influence the recipients’ responses. One of the types of expression is goal framing: positive goal flaming and negative goal flaming. The present study examined the effects of goal framing in utterance expression on recipients’ cognition, affects, and motivation for action. Fifty graduate and undergraduate students participated in an experiment using a hypothetical situation method with positive and negative goal framing. Two types of situations were provided: high involvement and low involvement. The situation was seminar in high involvement condition and job in low involvement condition. The speaker was a seminar professor in the former situation, and that was a workplace boss in the latter situation. The main results were as follows. (1) Utterance expression with positive goal framing led to recipients’ more positive responses in cognition, affects, and motivation for action than expression with negative goal framing. (2) Interaction between utterance expression and situation was significant in all indexes except cognition of utterance intention. There was no difference between the two situations in positive framing, while job situation induced more negative responses than seminar situation in negative framing. These findings suggest that positive framing can be used safely regardless of the situation, while negative framing requires caution in some situations for encouraging utterance. The present findings were discussed from the point that the influence of goal framing is not the same in personal communication and impersonal message.