One of the most important things I've read is the post Conversational Cultures: Combat vs Nurture.
A very short summary: what that post's author calls "combat culture" and what I will call "idea culture" is typified by people being willing to disagree with each other's ideas directly. A face-saving culture, or "nurture culture" is typified by people affirming each other, and interpreting direct criticism or disagreement as an attack.
I would recommend reading the post, but I'm not writing this post to convince you to read it, more to get out some thoughts on effective communication.
My stance: not neutral
I've been practicing direct idea culture communication my whole career, and it seems obviously better than the face-saving style.
I want to work with people who care more about their work than they care about their ego, or being superficially aligned during a conversation.
We're here to figure out the truth – I don't really trust my ideas until someone I trust has tried to argue with them. Working solo is a disadvantage because I don't get that check. Working in a face-saving culture is the worst case, because even though I can tell my ideas to people, nobody will tell me if they disagree with me, and as a result I feel like nobody is listening to me.
I do disagree with the post's author when they say that countersignalling (the sort of friendly insulting that often happens between friends) has any place in an effective idea culture – productive arguments are about ideas and any hint of insulting, even as a joke, tends to get ego involved when it shouldn't be.
What is effective idea culture?
Ineffective idea culture just looks like two people arguing without really listening to each other. They might throw out some worthwhile ideas, but they're not seriously working to test their ideas out.
Mid-level idea culture might still look like an argument, but without the frustration. The parties involved are iterating on their ideas during the argument.
The more effective the speakers are at idea culture arguments, the more clearly they will talk about the assertions being made, and the quicker they update their position when their counterparty makes a valid argument.
At higher levels it doesn't even look like an argument, it's just 2+ people having a discussion and quickly figuring out the Most Correct direction forward, as far as their human reason and experience are capable of. This post is a good description of the communication effectiveness spectrum.
Does idea culture make you disagreeable?
It shouldn't. If you honestly care about finding the best way to do something, you should want other people who care to be willing to share their thoughts with you when they differ from yours.
The people I've worked with who cared the most about doing the best job possible, and were willing to argue with me when they thought I was wrong, have tended to be the ones I most wanted to be friends with.
I appreciate this NYT piece on work team culture that comes to the conclusion that "psychological safety" is a trait shared by effective teams. That psychological safety doesn't mean that people avoid disagreeing with each other, it means that they trust their peers not to punish them for saying something risky.
The coworkers I've had the best arguments with about how to solve job problems were also the ones who I talked to about theology, spouses, kids, education, etc – even though we came from very different backgrounds and had very different opinions.
Since it wasn't a topic relevant to our job, we didn't expect to need to change anyone else's mind during the conversations, and we trusted each other enough to know that even though someone might have strong opinions, they wouldn't get worked up about them and were prepared to empathize.
I've only ever had that kind of relationship with coworkers who practiced idea culture.
Clients vs coworkers
Interestingly, I've never had communication culture collisions with clients or customers. In those discussions we don't need to argue to figure out the truth – the truth of the matter is that the customer has a problem, and I'm going to fix it for them.
Those discussions are more like an interview. Sometimes they'll ask for a specific fix that wouldn't be a good idea and I'll have to sidestep it to keep asking them details about the underlying problem, and sometimes the problem will boil down to a misunderstanding, but either way I'm there to learn what I need to solve their problem.
The idea/face-saving communication culture spectrum comes into play after the client discussion, when I'm back with my coworkers and we need to figure out the best way to solve that customer's problems in the context of the whole project and all our other customers.
Addendum: Why change the names?
I've found that when talking to people about this communication style spectrum using the names from the original post above, people can easily get hung up on the terms.
It's too easy to think of "combat" as two people fighting each other (as opposed to a willingness to challenge ideas), and "nurture" as a positive environment, even though I find nurture/face-saving culture extremely stressful, and feel nurtured in an environment where people respect me enough to point out flaws in my ideas directly.