Learning to listen: Downstream effects of listening training on employees' relatedness, burnout, and turnover intentions
Abstract
The present work focuses on listening training as an example of a relational human resource practice that can improve human resource outcomes: Relatedness to colleagues, burnout, and turnover intentions. In two quasi-field experiments, employees were assigned to either a group listening training or a control condition. Both immediately after training and 3 weeks later, receiving listening training was shown to be linked to higher feelings of relatedness with colleagues, lower burnout, and lower turnover intentions. These findings suggest that listening training can be harnessed as a powerful human resource management tool to cultivate stronger relationships at work. The implications of Relational Coordination Theory, High-Quality Connections Theory, and Self-Determination Theory are discussed.
The Effect of a Dilemma on the Relationship Between Ability to Identify the Criterion (ATIC) and Scores on a Validated Situational Interview
Gary P. Latham, Guy Itzchakov
Goal Setting
Four experiments were conducted to determine whether participants’ awareness of the performance criterion on which they were being evaluated results in higher scores on a criterion-valid situational interview (SI) where each question either contains or does not contain a dilemma. In the first experiment, there was no significant difference between those who were or were not informed of the performance criterion that the SI questions predicted. Experiment 2 replicated this finding. In each instance, the SI questions in these two experiments contained a dilemma. In a third experiment, participants were randomly assigned to a 2 (knowledge/no knowledge provided of the criterion) X 2 (SI dilemma/no dilemma) design. Knowledge of the criterion increased interview scores only when the questions did not contain a dilemma. The fourth experiment revealed that including a dilemma in a SI question attenuates the ATIC-SI relationship when participants must identify rather than be informed of the performance criterion that the SI has been developed to assess.
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Feeling torn and fearing rue: Attitude ambivalence and anticipated regret as antecedents of biased information seeking
Guy Itzchakova, Frenk Van Harreveld
Attitudes
Theoretical work on attitudinal ambivalence suggests that anticipated regret may play a role in causing
awareness of contradictions that subsequently induce a feeling of an evaluative conflict. In the present paper we empirically examined how the anticipation of regret relates to the association between the simultaneous pre-
sence of contradictory cognitions and emotions (objective ambivalence), and the evaluative conflict associated with it (subjective ambivalence), in the context of decision-making. Across three studies (Ns = 204,127,244), manipulating both objective ambivalence and regret, we consistently found that when a dichotomous ambiva-
lent choice had to be made, (objectively) ambivalent attitude holders for whom feelings of anticipated regret were made salient reported higher levels of subjective-attitude ambivalence than participants in the other
conditions. Moreover, in Studies 2 and 3 we found that the effect of anticipated regret on subjective ambivalence
had consequences on information processing. Specifically, anticipating regret made ambivalent participants
search for attitude-congruent information. This effect was mediated by the increase in subjective ambivalence. This work provides the first empirical evidence for the role of regret in the association between objective-and-
subjective attitude ambivalence, and its consequences.
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