Dear all:
Below (and attached) please find a draft of a symposium abstract. We – <st1:personname productid="Dean Tjosvold" w:st="on">Dean Tjosvold</st1:personname>, <st1:personname productid="Denise Potosky" w:st="on">Denise Potosky</st1:personname>, and I -- are looking for people who may be able to teach us and contribute to the promotion of research on the topic of listening at AoM 2010 meeting.
Listening
"I've told you a million (thousand) times" is often heard from bosses, teachers, parents, partners and other people in position of power. If you consider the logic of this statement, it suggests "I am trying something a million times, it fails, and I try again, anyhow." This symposium considers a transformative alternative available to a person in this predicament: listening. Listening provides a means for leaders, managers, employees, and customers to infuse compassion into their work-related communication.
Consider Jacob (a real story; the name is changed), a manager at the Hebrew University who was fuming mad and ready to fire one of his subordinates because of repeated absences and tardiness. But then Jacob was trained in active listening, which one of the authors of this proposal adopted from marital therapy practice (Hendrix, 1988) to be used in the workplace. Jacob's assignment was to listen to his subordinate, to probe for "what else," to reflect what he heard, and to take responsibility for some of the complaints of the subordinate. As a result of his application of these listening techniques, Jacob was stunned to discover that his subordinate was barely coping with taking care of his wife who was sick with cancer and his children, that he loved his job, and that he was clueless on how to manage the dual demands. Jacob decided not to fire his subordinate, but to help him learn skills to better cope with his challenging circumstances.
The "miracle" or transformation in relationships afforded by true listening, which is opposite to the common experience of protracted conflicts, was noted long ago by Carl Rogers (e.g., Rogers & Roethlisberger, 1991/1952). In addition, practitioners in various fields emphasize the importance of a special type of listening referred to as active listening, attentive listening, empathetic listening, or interactional listening, for getting results. These fields include effectiveness in business and in life (Covey, 1989), marketing (Drollinger, Comer, & Warrington, 2006), alternatives to performance appraisals (Kluger & Nir, in press), trauma treatment (Shay, 1994), martial therapy (Hendrix, 1988), improving parent-child relationships (Faber & Mazlish, 1980), and training medical students (Boudreau, Cassell, & Fuks, 2009), to name a few. A few scholars in the organizational sciences have empirically documented some of the benefits of listening. For example, salespersons listening skills was found to correlate with attaining sales objectives (Drollinger et al., 2006), and supervisors self-reported listening skills was found to be correlated with independent reports of subordinates regarding their well being (Mineyama, Tsutsumi, Takao, Nishiuchi, & Kawakami, 2007).
In contrast to the importance of listening noted both by theorists and practitioners in other fields, management research of listening is rare. This paucity of research is a fertile ground for management research. More importantly, understanding listening has great potential for contributing to the development of caring organizations because "A person can listen without caring but can't care without listening" as noted by an anonymous mentally-ill patient who was interviewed in a study designed to assess what makes a patient feel understood (Shattell, McAllister, Hogan, & Thomas, 2006).
To promote both theoretical understanding of listening and research, we propose to cover the following three topics in the symposium.
Avraham Kluger will present a theory regarding the effects of listening on the self of the person being listened to. Specifically, relying on dialogical self theory (Hermans, 1996), he will propose that being listened to gradually allows submissive voices within the self to assert themselves, to be heard, and thus contribute first to differentiation within the self and next for the possibility of increased well being via integration of voices within the self.
<st1:personname productid="Denise Potosky" w:st="on">Denise Potosky</st1:personname> will review the instruments available to measure the skill of listening to discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with measuring individuals' listening skills.
<st1:personname productid="Dean Tjosvold" w:st="on">Dean Tjosvold</st1:personname> will discuss the application of the listening skill in "constructive controversy" to promote both business education and learning in work settings. He will show that a listening technique of "role reversal" has been demonstrated to improve communication and facilitate conflict management (Johnson, 1967, 1971).
REFERENCES
Boudreau, J. D., Cassell, E., & Fuks, A. 2009. Preparing medical students to become attentive listeners. Medical Teacher, 31(1): 22-29.
Covey, S. R. 1989. The seven habits of highly effective people : restoring the character ethic. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Drollinger, T., Comer, L. B., & Warrington, P. T. 2006. Development and validation of the active empathetic listening scale. Psychology & Marketing, 23(2): 161-180.
Faber, A. & Mazlish, E. 1980. How to talk so kids will listen & listen so kids will talk (1st ed.). New York: Rawson, Wade Publishers.
Hendrix, H. 1988. Getting the love you want : a guide for couples (1st ed.). New York: H. Holt.
Hermans, H. J. M. 1996. Voicing the self: From information processing to dialogical interchange. Psychological Bulletin, 119(1): 31-50.
Johnson, D. W. 1967. Use of Role Reversal in Intergroup Competition. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 7(2P1): 135-&.
Johnson, D. W. 1971. Role reversal: A summary and review of the research. International Journal of Group Tensions, 1: 318-334.
Kluger, A. N. & Nir, D. in press. The Feedforward Interview. Human Resource Management Review.
Mineyama, S., Tsutsumi, A., Takao, S., Nishiuchi, K., & Kawakami, N. 2007. Supervisors' attitudes and skills for active listening with regard to working conditions and psychological stress reactions among subordinate workers. Journal of Occupational Health, 49(2): 81-87.
Rogers, C. R. & Roethlisberger, F. J. 1991/1952. HBR Classic - Barriers and gateways to communication (Reprinted from Harvard Business Review, July August, 1952). Harvard Business Review, 69(6): 105-111.
Shattell, M. M., McAllister, S., Hogan, B., & Thomas, S. P. 2006. "She took the time to make sure she understood": Mental health patients' experiences of being understood. Archives of Psychiatric Nursing, 20(5): 234-241.
Shay, J. 1994. Achilles in Vietnam : combat trauma and the undoing of character. New York: Atheneum.