If You Want People to Listen to You, Tell a Story

Remote work arrangement: a blessing in disguise for socially anxious individuals

This research examines the link between social anxiety disorder (SAD), psychological distance (PD), and burnout using survey data from 463 software development workers who are currently working remotely. According to the results of the study, SAD was associated with higher PD, but, in contrast to what had been shown in earlier studies, this higher PD had no effect on the participants' reported levels of burnout. Both psychological safety and workplace attachment orientation (WAO) were tested for their moderating effects in this study. According to the study's findings, the link between SAD and PD was moderated by WAO but not by psychological safety. The findings of this study underscore the importance of conducting additional research on the challenges faced by people with social anxiety in the workplace and the steps that can be taken by employers to better accommodate them.

The effects of listening with "time-sharing" on psychological safety and social anxiety: the moderating role of narcissism and depression

Listeners who interrupt speakers upset the speakers and prevent the benefits of good listening. Interruptions can be avoided with "time-sharing," where each partner listens (silently) for an equal amount of time. Yet, is time-sharing good for all? In an experiment with 50 pairs (95 participants with useable data), participants conversed freely for one minute and were then assigned either to a time-sharing (of three minutes each) or a free conversation condition. Consistent with our hypotheses, speakers in the time-sharing condition showed reduced social anxiety if they were high on narcissism but elevated social anxiety if high on depression, explaining past inconsistent effects of time-sharing.

Listen to resonate: Better listening as a gateway to interpersonal positivity resonance through enhanced sensory connection and perceived safety

Although often experienced individually, emotions are at times co-experienced with others, collectively. One type of collective emotion, termed positivity resonance, refers to coexperienced positive affect accompanied by caring non-verbal behavioral synchrony and biological synchrony across persons. Growing evidence illustrates the contributions of positivity resonance to individual, relational, and community well-being. Two conditions theorized as conducive for the emergence of positivity resonance are real-time sensory connection and perceived safety. Here, we explore listening as an interpersonal process that can serve to enhance real-time sensory connection and perceived safety and thereby increase positivity resonance among conversation partners. Specifically, we present evidence that connects listening to direct gaze (i.e., real-time sensory connection) and psychological safety (i.e., perceived safety). We close by offering a framework to guide future research that can test whether and how conversational listening functions to create more moments of positivity resonance in interpersonal contexts.

How to get through hard times: Principals' listening buffers teachers' stress on turnover intention and promotes organizational citizenship behavior

When principals listen to their teachers, they may foster an open and receptive work environment that helps teachers adapt during stressful times. Two studies examined the role of perceived principals' listening to teachers on workplace outcomes. Study 1 (N = 218) was conducted during the first nationwide lockdown in Israel. Study 2 (N = 247) was conducted during a later lockdown and controlled for social support to test the independent effects of the two distinct interpersonal experiences. Findings supported our hypothesis that principals' listening would relate to lower teacher turnover intention. In addition, in line with our hypothesis, teachers high on perceived stress generally reported higher turnover intentions. However, the detrimental effect of perceived stress was not observed when teachers evaluated their principals as good listeners. Finally, we anticipated and found that principal listening is associated with organizational citizenship behavior. Specifically, teachers were more likely to help one another when feeling listened to by their principals.

Attitudes in an interpersonal context: Psychological safety as a route to attitude change

Interpersonal contexts can be complex because they can involve two or more people who are interdependent, each of whom is pursuing both individual and shared goals. Interactions consist of individual and joint behaviors that evolve dynamically over time. Interactions are likely to affect people’s attitudes because the interpersonal context gives conversation partners a great deal of opportunity to intentionally or unintentionally influence each other. However, despite the importance of attitudes and attitude change in interpersonal interactions, this topic remains understudied. To shed light on the importance of this topic. We briefly review the features of interpersonal contexts and build a case that understanding people’s sense of psychological safety is key to understanding interpersonal influences on people’s attitudes. Specifically, feeling psychologically safe can make individuals more open-minded, increase reflective introspection, and decrease defensive processing. Psychological safety impacts how individuals think, make sense of their social world, and process attitude-relevant information. These processes can result in attitude change, even without any attempt at persuasion. We review the literature on interpersonal threats, receiving psychological safety, providing psychological safety, and interpersonal dynamics. We then detail the shortcomings of current approaches, highlight unanswered questions, and suggest avenues for future research that can contribute in developing this field.

The Power of Listening at Work

Listening is associated with and a likely cause of desired organizational outcomes in numerous areas, including job performance, leadership, quality of relationships (e.g., trust), job knowledge, job attitudes, and well-being. To advance understanding of the powerful effects of listening on organizational outcomes, we review the construct of listening, its measurement and experimental manipulations, and its outcomes, antecedents, and moderators. We suggest that listening is a dyadic phenomenon that benefits both the listener and the speaker, including supervisor-subordinate and salesperson-customer dyads. To explain previous findings and generate novel and testable hypotheses, we propose the episodic listening theory: listening can lead to a fleeting state of togetherness, in which dyad members undergo a mutual creative thought process. This process yields clarity, facilitates the generation of novel plans, increases well-being, and strengthens attachment to the conversation partner.

Toward a pedagogy of connection: A critical view of being relational in listening

Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) perspectives define interpersonal work experiences such as positive work relationships and high-quality connections by the mutual growth and empowerment experienced by relationship or connection partners. Listening has been implicated as a key mechanism for building such positive interpersonal work experiences, but it is unclear how listening spurs on mutual, rather than one-sided growth, in relationship and connection partners. In this paper, we argue that management education currently focuses on the intrapersonal capability of listeners to execute key verbal and non-verbal behaviors. Less emphasis is placed on the mutual experience co-created between speaker and listener and, thus, on the potential for mutual growth and empowerment. We articulate what “being relational” in the listening experience means, and use experiential learning theory to articulate how educators might create learning spaces for “being relational” through conversations between listener and speaker. Throughout the paper we contend with issues of individual and structural power asymmetries inherent in understanding listening as a relational process.

Feeling Heard: Experiences of Listening (or Not) at Work

Listening has been identified as a key workplace skill, important for ensuring high-quality communication, building relationships, and motivating employees. However, recent research has increasingly suggested that speaker perceptions of good listening do not necessarily align with researcher or listener conceptions of good listening. While many of the benefits of workplace listening rely on employees feeling heard, little is known about what constitutes this subjective perception. To better understand what leaves employees feeling heard or unheard, we conducted 41 interviews with bank employees, who collectively provided 81 stories about listening interactions they had experienced at work. Whereas, prior research has typically characterized listening as something that is perceived through responsive behaviors within conversation, our findings suggest conversational behaviors alone are often insufficient to distinguish between stories of feeling heard vs. feeling unheard. Instead, our interviewees felt heard or unheard only when listeners met their subjective needs and expectations. Sometimes their needs and expectations could be fulfilled through conversation alone, and other times action was required. Notably, what would be categorized objectively as good listening during an initial conversation could be later counteracted by a failure to follow-through in ways expected by the speaker. In concert, these findings contribute to both theory and practice by clarifying how listening behaviors take on meaning from the speakers' perspective and the circumstances under which action is integral to feeling heard. Moreover, they point toward the various ways listeners can engage to help speakers feel heard in critical conversations.

Can high quality listening predict lower speakers' prejudiced attitudes?

Theorizing from humanistic and motivational literatures suggests attitude change may occur because high quality listening facilitates the insight needed to explore and integrate potentially threatening information relevant to the self. By extension, self-insight may enable attitude change as a result of conversations about prejudice. We tested whether high quality listening would predict attitudes related to speakers' prejudices and whether self-insight would mediate this effect. Study 1 (preregistered) examined scripted conversations characterized by high, regular, and poor listening quality. In Study 2, we manipulated high versus regular listening quality in the laboratory as speakers talked about their prejudiced attitudes. Finally, Study 3 (preregistered) used a more robust measure of prejudiced attitudes to test whether perceived social acceptance could be an alternative explanation to Study 2 findings. Across these studies, the exploratory (pilot study and Study 2) and confirmatory (Studies 1 & 3) findings were in line with expectations that high, versus regular and poor, quality listening facilitated lower prejudiced attitudes because it increased self-insight. A meta-analysis of the studies (N = 952) showed that the average effect sizes for high quality listening (vs. comparison conditions) on self-insight, openness to change and prejudiced attitudes were, ds = 1.19, 0.46, 0.32 95%CIs [0.73, 1.51], [0.29, 0.63] [0.12, 0.53], respectively. These results suggest that when having conversations about prejudice, high-quality listening modestly shapes prejudice following conversations about it, and underscore the importance of self-insight and openness to change in this process.

The Listener Sets the Tone: High-Quality Listening Increases Attitude Clarity and Behavior-Intention Consequences

We examined how merely sharing attitudes with a good listener shapes speakers' attitudes. We predicted that high-quality (i.e., empathic, attentive, and nonjudgmental) listening reduces speakers' social anxiety and leads them to delve deeper into their attitude-relevant knowledge (greater self-awareness). This, subsequently, differentially affects two components of speaker's attitude certainty by increasing attitude clarity, but not attitude correctness. In addition, we predicted that this increased clarity is followed by increased attitude- expression intentions, but not attitude- persuasion intentions. We obtained consistent support for our hypotheses across five experiments (including one preregistered study), manipulating listening behavior in a variety of ways. This is the first evidence that an interpersonal variable, unrelated to the attitude itself, can affect attitude clarity and its consequences.

I Am Aware of My Inconsistencies but Can Tolerate Them: The Effect of High Quality Listening on Speakers' Attitude Ambivalence

We examined how listeners characterized by empathy and a non-judgmental approach affect speakers' attitude structure. We hypothesized that high quality listening decreases speakers' social anxiety, which in turn reduces defensive processing. This reduction in defensive processing was hypothesized to result in an awareness of contradictions (increased objective-attitude ambivalence), and decreased attitude extremity. Moreover, we hypothesized that experiencing high quality listening would enable speakers to tolerate contradictory responses, such that listening would attenuate the association between objective- and subjective-attitude ambivalence. We obtained consistent support for our hypotheses across four laboratory experiments that manipulated listening experience in different ways on a range of attitude topics. The effects of listening on objective-attitude ambivalence were stronger for higher dispositional social anxiety and initial objective-attitude ambivalence (Study 4). Overall, the results suggest that speakers' attitude structure can be changed by a heretofore unexplored interpersonal variable: merely providing high quality listening.