Partners Among Strangers: A Social Relations Perspective on Personality and Collaborative Partner Preferences in First Encounters
Vasiliki Kentrou
Collaborative partnerships are often formed following a first encounter. In a professional setting, for example, unacquainted individuals may collaborate to complete a project, develop a product, or solve a problem. Using target- and relationship-specific effects from the Social Relations Model (SRM), we examined whether first-encounter perceptions of extraversion, honesty-humility, and competence are related to partner preferences for collaborative tasks and whether the roles of honesty-humility and competence in shaping partner preferences vary as a function of task type. Previously unacquainted participants (N = 297, 55 groups, 55.9% female) engaged in dyadic interactions and provided round-robin ratings of personality, competence, and partner preferences for either a trust-based or competence-based task. Individuals who were consensually viewed as extraverted and/or competent were preferred as partners, regardless of task type. Individuals who were uniquely viewed as honest-humble, extraverted, and/or competent were uniquely preferred as partners. Task type moderated the positive relation between relationship-specific honesty-humility and competence on the one hand and partner preference on the other, albeit not in the hypothesized directions. Findings underscore the relevance of relationship-specific extraversion, competence, and honesty-humility in shaping collaborative partner preferences in first encounters. Notably, the importance of these relationship-specific trait perceptions may vary depending on task type.