Guy Itzchakov

University of Haifa | haifa · Department of Human Services

Listening is associated with and a likely cause of desired organizational outcomes in numerous areas, including job performance, leadership, quality of relationships (e.g., trust), job knowledge, job attitudes, and well-being. To advance understanding of the powerful effects of listening on organizational outcomes, we review the construct of listen...

Memories of rejection contribute to feeling lonely. However, high-quality listening that conveys well-meaning attention and understanding when speakers discuss social rejection may help them to reconnect. Speakers may experience less loneliness because they feel close and connected (relatedness) to the listener and because listening supports self-c...

Listening and perceived responsiveness evoke a sense of interpersonal connection that benefits individuals and groups and is relevant to almost every field in Psychology, Management, Education, Communication, and Health, to name a few. In this paper, we, researchers who have devoted their careers to studying listening (first author) and perceived r...

This meta-analytic systematic review and theory by Kluger et al. explores the relationship between perceived listening and job performance. The study suggest that perceived listening improves job performance by enhancing listener-speaker relationship quality.

Disagreements can polarize attitudes when they evoke defensiveness from the conversation partners. When a speaker talks, listeners often think about ways to counterargue. This process often fails to depolarize attitudes and might even backfire (i.e., the Boomerang effect). However, what happens in disagreements if one conversation partner genuinely...

Using cross-sectional data from N = 4274 young adults across 16 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, we examined the cross-cultural measurement invariance of the perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD) scale and tested the hypothesis that the association between PVD and fear of COVID-19 is stronger under high disease threat [that is, absence of...

Using cross-sectional data from N = 4274 young adults across 16 countries during the COVID-19 pandemic, we examined the cross-cultural measurement invariance of the perceived vulnerability to disease (PVD) scale and tested the hypothesis that the association between PVD and fear of COVID-19 is stronger under high disease threat [that is, absence of...

Kluger, A. N., Lehmann, M., Aguinis, H., Itzchakov, G., Gordoni, G., Zyberaj, J., & Bakaç, C. (in press). A meta-analytic systematic review and theory of perceived listening and job outcomes (performance, relationship quality, affect, and cognition). Journal of Business and Psychology. Abstract The quality of listening in interpersonal contexts w...

Environmental cues (e.g. achievement-related words and pictures) can prime/activate, in the absence of awareness, a mental representation of importance stored in memory. Chen et al.’s 2021 Applied Psychology: An International Review 70, 216–253. (doi:10.1111/apps.12239) meta-analysis revealed a moderate, significant overall effect for the goal prim...

Training teachers to listen may enable them to experience increasingly attentive and open peer relationships at work. In the present research, we examined the outcomes of a year-long listening training on school teachers' listening abilities and its downstream consequences on their relational climate, autonomy, and psychological safety. Teachers in...

When principals listen to their teachers, they may foster an open and receptive work environment that helps teachers adapt during stressful times. Two studies examined the role of perceived principals' listening to teachers on workplace outcomes. Study 1 (N = 218) was conducted during the first nationwide lockdown in Israel. Study 2 (N = 247) was c...

Although gratitude is typically conceptualized as a positive emotion, it may also induce socially-oriented negative feelings, such as indebtedness and guilt. Given its mixed emotional experience, we argue that gratitude motivates people to improve themselves in important life domains. Two single-time point studies tested the immediate emotional and...

Interpersonal contexts can be complex since they can involve two or more people who are interdependent, each of whom is pursuing both individual and shared goals. Interactions consist of individual and joint behaviors that evolve dynamically over time. Interactions are likely to affect people’s attitudes because the interpersonal context gives the...

We present meta-analyses linking listening with job performance, experiments showing that feedback provider's listening increases the perceived quality of feedback, a motivational intervention emphasizing listening to increase openness towards diverse groups, and conclude with challenges about differentiating perceived supervisor listening from rel...

Extensive research has documented people’s desire for social partners who are responsive to their needs and preferences, and that when they perceive that others have been responsive, they and their relationships typically thrive. For these reasons, perceived partner responsiveness is well-positioned as a core organizing theme for the study of socia...

This research tests a novel source of resistance to social influence—the automatic repetition of habit. In three experiments, participants with strong habits failed to align their behavior with others. Specifically, participants with strong habits to drink water in a dining hall (Study 1) or snack while working (Study 2) did not mimic others’ drink...

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 traini...

Creating positive change in the direction intended is the goal of organizational interventions. Watts, Gray, and Medeiros (WGM; in press) raise this issue of “side effects,” which include changes that are unintended and often in the opposite direction of the organizational intervention. With our expertise in applied psychology, military psychiatry/...

Outcomes of conversations, including those dealing with controversial, deeply personal, or threatening disclosures, result not only from what is said but also from how listeners receive these messages. This paper integrates the motivational framework of self-determination theory (SDT; Ryan & Deci, 2017) and the expanding literature on interpersonal...

Social psychologists have a longstanding interest in the mechanisms responsible for the beneficial effects of positive social connections. This paper reviews and integrates two emerging but to this point disparate lines of work that focus on these mechanisms: high-quality listening and perceived partner responsiveness. We also review research inves...

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 t...

What is ‘good’ qualitative research? Considerable literature articulates criteria for quality in qualitative research. Common to all these criteria is the understanding that the data gathering process, often interviews, is central in assessing research quality. Studies have highlighted the preparation of the interview guide, appropriate ways to ask...

We examined how the experience of high-quality listening (attentive, empathic, and nonjudgmental) impacts speakers' basic psychological needs and state self-esteem when discussing the difficult topic of a prejudiced attitude. Specifically, we hypothesized that when speakers discuss a prejudiced attitude with high-quality listeners, they experience...

Parental listening is believed to be an important quality of parent-child interactions, but its effects on adolescents are not well understood. The present study experimentally manipulated parental listening in video recordings of an adolescent’s self-disclosure to test effects on anticipated well-being (positive affect, self-esteem, and less negat...

In this rejoinder we address three issues discussed in the commentaries on our lead article: possible ethical issues in goal priming in organizational settings, whether goal priming is restricted to routine behaviors, and the relationship of goal priming with self‐fulling prophesies and an organization’s climate. Finally, our data were examined by...

Theorizing from humanistic and motivational literatures suggests attitude change may occur because high quality listening facilitates the insight needed to explore and integrate potentially threatening information relevant to the self. By extension, self-insight may enable attitude change as a result of conversations about prejudice. We tested whet...

Can improving employees’ interpersonal listening abilities impact their emotions and cognitions during difficult conversations at work? The studies presented here examined the effectiveness of listening training on customer service employees. It was hypothesized that improving employees’ listening skills would (a) reduce their anxiety levels during...

Can perceived responsiveness, the belief that meaningful others attend to and react supportively to core defining feature of the self, shape the structure of attitudes? We predicted that perceived responsiveness fosters open-mindedness, which, in turn, allows people to be simultaneously aware of opposing evaluations of an attitude object. We also h...

Listening has powerful organizational consequences. However, studies of listening have typically focused on individual level processes. Alternatively, we hypothesized that perceptions of listening quality are inherently dyadic, positively reciprocated in dyads, and are correlated positively with intimacy, speaking ability, and helping-organizationa...

Purchasing decisions are increasingly based on reviews by fellow consumers which often consist of positive and negative evaluations about the product (i.e. valence-inconsistency). We tested how the vividness of these reviews affects individuals' attitude ambivalence towards the product and their strategies to cope with this ambivalence. We hypothes...

Drawing on results from 32 published and 20 unpublished laboratory and field experiments, we conducted an enumerative review of the primed goal effects on performance and need for achievement, two dependent variables of organizational relevance. The enumerative review suggests that goal setting theory is as applicable for subconscious goals as it i...

An understudied issue in the goal priming literature is why the same prime can provoke different responses in different people. The current research sheds light on this issue by investigating whether an individual difference variable, core self-evaluations (CSE), accounts for different responses from the same prime. Based on the findings of experim...

People who are involved in a conflict often complain that the other side is not listening. Even when the counterpart does listen, it is usually to debate, argue, convince, or discount, rather than to understand. Based on our research, we argue that people will be more effective in negotiations when they practice high quality listening. The benefits...

The effect of feedback and a self‐set goal on the relationship between a goal primed in the subconscious and performance were examined in three laboratory experiments and one field experiment (n = 241, 465, 201, 74 respectively), using normative (bogus) and absolute feedback manipulations, and different performance tasks that were coded for both pe...

https://hbr.org/2018/05/the-power-of-listening-in-helping-people-change

We examined how merely sharing attitudes with a good listener shapes speakers' attitudes. We predicted that high quality (i.e., empathic, attentive, and non-judgmental) listening reduces speakers’ social anxiety and leads them to delve deeper into their attitude relevant knowledge (greater self-awareness). This, in turn, differentially affects two...

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 presence of contradictory co...

Changing attitudes does not necessarily involve the same psychological processes as changing behavior, yet social psychology is only just beginning to identify the different mechanisms involved. We contribute to this understanding by showing that the moderators of attitude change are not necessarily the moderators of behavior change. The results of...

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 intervent...

Listening is an essential part of interpersonal communication at the workplace, and it is often considered one of the most important forms of communication behavior. Employees' spend almost half their day listening to their interlocutors, such as their managers, colleagues, or their customers. However, despite listening' prevalence, most people, an...

We examined how listeners characterized by empathy and a non-judgmental approach impact speakers' attitude structure. We hypothesized that high quality listening decreases speakers' social anxiety, which in turn reduces defensive processing. This reduction in defensive processing was hypothesized to result in an awareness of contradictions (increas...

You think that you listen to your counterparts in negotiation—but do you really understand them? In this chapter, Itzchakov and Kluger offer a unique, research-based perspective on the power of listening-with-understanding, based on Carl Rogers’ theories in clinical psychology. This approach can change speakers’ attitudes, making them more complex...

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 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-analyze...

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 sto...

We developed a new listening scale pertaining to how one likes to be listened to by others. Specifically, we constructed items by adapting the Listening Style Profile (LSP)-16 and a Constructive Listening subscale taken from the Facilitative Listening Scale and tested the validity of the scale against the Big Five personality traits. A survey (N =...

The relative income hypothesis (Duesenberry, 1949) states that individual’s attitude to consumption and saving is dictated more by his income in relation to others than by abstract standard of living so that the individual is less concerned with absolute level of consumption than by relative levels. The following study examines the validity of this...