Can holding a stick improve listening at work? The effect of Listening Circles on employees’ emotions and cognitions

ABSTRACT

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 signalled 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 acknowledgement 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.

KEYWORDS:

• Listening Circle
• social anxiety
• reflective self-awareness
• attitude ambivalence
• attitude extremity

Acknowledgements

The authors thank Eran Halevy and Nurit Halevy-El-Yosef for allowing us to collect data in their Listening Circles and for facilitating our access to collect data in other workshops and Dov Eden for comments on an earlier draft of this manuscript. This research was supported by grants from the Recanati Fund at the School of Business Administration and by The Israel Science Foundation (145/12) to the second author.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. For example, http://www.heart-source.com/council/way_of_council_page.html.

2. The purpose of this instruction is to take pressure off the attendees. The vast majority of the participants choose to actively participate.

3. Most employees who participated in the workshops were not previously acquainted with each other.

4. In case other employees might know who that person was.

5. One of the Listening Circle’s instructors provided to us with this information. The researchers were not present in the room at the time of the workshops.

6. In all studies we obtained similar results when we analysed the data by computing a residual score for each variable and submitted it to an independent t-test.

7. In all studies we obtained similar results when using the manipulation check (listening perception) as the independent variable, instead of the workshop type.

8. At the high-tech company attendees in both groups conversed at the exact same times (10:30 and 13:00). The Listening Circle in the school took place on a different day from 9:15 to 11:00. Note that the Listening Circles in this study were shorter than the Listening Circles in Study 1 and Study 2.

9. There was no difference for any of the variables between attendees in the Listening Circle at the high-tech company and the Listening Circle at the school.

10. Note that our focal hypothesis regarding subjective ambivalence referred to the buffering role of listening on the association between objective and subjective ambivalence, which was supported in Study 2 and Study 3. The main effect of listening on subjective ambivalence was similar in magnitude to the effect obtained in laboratory experiments (Itzchakov et al., 2017), where the meta-analytic effect was significant on a large sample size (N = 632).

11. Note that this research expands Itzchakov et al. (2017), by including reflective self-awareness in the model.

12. Subjective ambivalence was measured in two studies, N = 149.

Additional information

Funding

This research was supported by grants from the Recanati Fund at the School of Business Administration and by The Israel Science Foundation (145/12) to the second author.