Avraham N Kluger

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 (N's = 31, 66, 83) we compared the effects of a Listening Circle workshop to a self-enhancement workshop (Studies 1 and 2), 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.

In this study, we tested both Rogers's hypothesis that listening enables speakers to
experience psychological safety, and our hypothesis that the benefit of listening for
psychological safety is attenuated by avoidance-attachment style. We tested these hypotheses in six laboratory experiments, a field correlational study, and a scenario experiment. We meta analyzed the results of the laboratory experiments and found that listening increased psychological safety on average, but that the variance between the experiments was also significant. The between experiment variance in the effect of listening manipulation on psychological safety exposes a methodological challenge in choosing a research paradigm of good-versus-normal listening, as opposed to normal-versus-poor listening. More importantly, we found, as expected and across all designs, that the higher the avoidance-attachment style was, the lower the effect of listening was on psychological safety. This finding has implications both for practice and for placing a theoretical boundary on Rogers's theory.

We hypothesized that (a) when people share a meaningful story, as opposed to when they share
information, they make their partner listen well, and (b) that narrative-induced listening is positively
associated with speakers’ psychological safety and negatively associated with their social anxiety.
In Study 1 (N = 45), we showed that a meaningful story is perceived much more as a narrative and
higher in narrative quality than two types of informational-discourses (telling about daily routine
and describing buildings). In Study 2 (N = 52), we randomly asked participants to either share a
meaningful story or tell about their daily routine. The participants sharing a meaningful story reported
that their interlocutor was a better listener, d = 0.61, 95% CI |0.32, 0.92|. In Study 3 (N = 42), we
compared the effect of sharing a meaningful story to describing buildings, and replicated the results
of Study 2, d = 1.10, 95% CI |0.61, 1.59|. Moreover, we found that the perceived listening, which
was induced by the narrative, mediated the manipulation effects on psychological safety, and social
anxiety. Thus, we concluded that when speakers share meaningful stories they make their partner
listen well and consequently experience higher psychological safety and lower feelings of social
anxiety.

Past research has suggested that dispositional sources of job satisfaction can be traced to measures of affective temperament. The present research focused on another concept, core self-evaluations, which were hypothesized to comprise self-esteem, generalized self-efficacy, locus of control, and nonneuroticism. A model hypothesized that core self-evaluations would have direct effects on job and life satisfaction. It also was hypothesized that core self-evaluations would have indirect effects on job satisfaction. Data were collected from 3 independent samples in 2 countries, using dual source methodology. Results indicated that core self-evaluations had direct and indirect effects on job and life satisfaction. The statistical and logical relationship among core evaluations, affective disposition, and satisfaction was explored.

We studied the effects of faking biodata test items by randomly warning 214 of 429 applicants for a nurse's assistant position against faking. While the warning mitigated the propensity to fake, the specific warning effects depended on item transparency. For transparent items, warning reduced the extremeness of item means and increased item variances. For nontransparent items, warning did not have an effect on item means and reduced item variances. These faking effects were best predicted when transparency was operationalized in terms of item-specific job desirability in addition to the item-general social desirability. We also demonstrated a psychometric principle: The effect of warning on means at the item level is preserved in scales constructed from those items, but the effect on variances at the item level is masked at the scale level. These results raise new questions regarding the attenuating effects of faking on validity, and regarding the benefit of warning applicants against faking.