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

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.

An employee’s listening ability has implications for the effectiveness of the work team, the organization, and for the employee’s own success. Estimates of the frequency of listening suggest that workers spend about 30% of their communication time listening. However, the ability to listen might be even more important to managers, as empirical evidence suggest that they spent more than 60% of their time listening. Hence, the success of both the employee and the manager in communication, and thus in the organization, rests in part on possessing good listening abilities.