Sowing the seeds of love: Cultivating perceptions of culture of companionate love through listening and its effects on organizational outcomes
Abstract
Fostering a culture of companionate love in the workplace
offers numerous benefits for employees, yet the
methods for achieving this remain unclear. We propose
that high-quality listening, characterized by undivided
attention, understanding, and a positive and nonjudgmental
intention toward the speaker, could be a
key facilitator. We hypothesized that such listening
could enhance employees' perceptions of companionate
love. Additionally, we hypothesized that an enhanced
perception of companionate love would increase
employees' subjective well-being, resilience, affective
commitment, and willingness to cooperate at work. To
examine these hypotheses, we conducted four studies.
Study 1 was a preregistered and highly-powered field
study (N = 752) involving employees from various
organizations. Study 2 (N = 37), was a longitudinal
research that included a listening training of 16 hours
for teachers in a single school. Study 3 was a quasi-field
experiment within a risk-management company, with
employees receiving 12 hours of listening education
while a waitlist served as a control group (N = 67).
Study 4 was a quasi-experiment that served as a conceptual
replication and extension of Studies 2 and
3. The study involved listening training for employees
in a global communications company, providing
14 hours of online listening training. An active control
group (N = 60) was included. Across all studies, we
found that feeling listened to by colleagues led to
increased perceptions of companionate love in the
organization, which, in turn, increased employees' subjective
well-being, resilience, affective organizational
commitment, and willingness to collaborate. Theoretical
and practical implications are discussed.
Learning to listen: Downstream effects of listening training on employees' relatedness, burnout, and turnover intentions
Guy Itzchakov, Netta Weinstein, Arik Cheshin
Listening
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.
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Can holding a stick improve listening at work? The effect of Listening Circles on employees’ emotions and cognitions
Guy Itzchakov, Avraham N. Kluger
Listening
The Listening Circle is a method for improving listening in organizations. It involves people sitting in a circle where only one talks at a time. Talking turns are signaled by a talking object. Although there are several reports regarding the effectiveness of the Listening Circle, most are based on case studies, or confounded with another intervention, and do not use theory to predict the listening-induced outcomes. We predicted that perceiving good listening decreases employees’ social anxiety, which allows them to engage in deeper introspection, as reflected by increased self-awareness. This increased self-awareness enables an acknowledgment of the pros and cons of various work-related attitudes and can lead to attitudes that are objectively more ambivalent and less extreme. Further, we hypothesized that experiencing good listening will enable speakers to accept their contradictions without the evaluative conflict usually associated with it (subjective-attitude ambivalence). In three quasi-experiments (Ns = 31, 66 and 83), we compared the effects of a Listening Circle workshop to a self-enhancement workshop (Studies 1 and 2), to a conflict management workshop (Study 2) and to employees who did not receive any training (Study 3), and found consistent support for the hypotheses. Our results suggest that the Listening Circle is an effective intervention that can benefit organizations.
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