Avoiding harm, benefits of interpersonal listening, and social equilibrium adjustment: An applied psychology approach to side effects of organizational interventions

Conversations with people who hold opposite partisan attitudes can elicit defensiveness, reinforce extreme attitudes, and undermine relationships with those with opposing views. However, this might not be the case when speakers experience high-quality (attentive, 2 understanding, and non-judgmental) listening from their conversation partners. We hypothesized that high-quality listening will increase speakers’ positive views toward, and their willingness to further interact with, others who hold politically opposed attitudes, and that these effects will be mediated by greater state openness. We conducted three experiments using different modalities to manipulate listening. In Study 1 (N = 379), participants recalled a conversation with an opposing political party member, with listening quality described as high-quality, low-quality, or control. Study 2 (N = 269) used imagined interactions, with participants reading vignettes describing either high-quality listening or a control condition. In Study 3 (preregistered; N = 741), participants watched a video of a listener modeling high-quality or moderate-quality listening and imagined themselves engaging in a similar interaction. Across studies, we found that high-quality listening consistently increased speakers’ state openness to politically opposed others, but did not change political attitudes. We found inconsistent evidence for speakers’ increased willingness to engage in future interactions (meta-analytic effect: 𝑑 = 0.20, p = .015). However, the indirect effect of listening on positive attitudes and willingness for future interactions through increased openness was consistently significant.

The quality of listening in interpersonal contexts was hypothesized to improve a variety of work outcomes. However, research of this general hypothesis is dispersed across multiple disciplines and mostly atheoretical. We propose that perceived listening improves job performance through its efects on afect, cognition, and relationship quality. To test our theory, we conducted a registered systematic review and multiple meta-analyses, using three-level meta-analysis models, based on 664 efect sizes and 400,020 observations. Our results suggest a strong positive correlation between perceived listening and work outcomes, r = .39, 95%CI=[.36, .43], 휌 = .44, with the efect on relationship quality, r =.51, being stronger than the efect on performance, r =.36. These fndings partially support our theory, indicating that perceived listening may enhance job performance by improving relationship quality. However, 75% of the literature relied on self-reports raising concerns about discriminant validity. Despite this limitation, removing data solely based on self-reports still produced substantial estimates of the association between listening and work outcomes (e.g., listening and job performance, r = .21, 95%CI=[.13, .29], 휌 = .23). Our meta-analyses suggest further research into (a) the relationship between listening and job knowledge, (b) measures assessing poor listening behaviors, (c) the incremental validity of listening in predicting listeners’ and speakers’ job performance, and (d) listening as a means to improve relationships at work.