Feeling Heard: Experiences of Listening (or Not) at Work.

Listening has been identified as a key workplace skill, important for ensuring high-quality communication, building relationships, and motivating employees. However, recent research has increasingly suggested that speaker perceptions of good listening do not necessarily align with researcher or listener conceptions of good listening. While many of the benefits of workplace listening rely on employees feeling heard, little is known about what constitutes this subjective perception. To better understand what leaves employees feeling heard or unheard, we conducted 41 interviews with bank employees, who collectively provided 81 stories about listening interactions they had experienced at work. Whereas, prior research has typically characterized listening as something that is perceived through responsive behaviors within conversation, our findings suggest conversational behaviors alone are often insufficient to distinguish between stories of feeling heard vs. feeling unheard. Instead, our interviewees felt heard or unheard only when listeners met their subjective needs and expectations. Sometimes their needs and expectations could be fulfilled through conversation alone, and other times action was required. Notably, what would be categorized objectively as good listening during an initial conversation could be later counteracted by a failure to follow-through in ways expected by the speaker. In concert, these findings contribute to both theory and practice by clarifying how listening behaviors take on meaning from the speakers' perspective and the circumstances under which action is integral to feeling heard. Moreover, they point toward the various ways listeners can engage to help speakers feel heard in critical conversations.

Coping with organizational layoffs: Managers' increased active listening reduces job insecurity via perceived situational control.

In this article, we draw on interdisciplinary research and theorizing to posit change in managerial active listening as a lever shaping change in affective job insecurity (AJI). Specifically, drawing on transactional theory, we argue that an increase (decrease) in active listening from one's manager should facilitate a dynamic coping process by strengthening (diminishing) perceived control. In turn, changes in perceived control should shape AJI. Using a longitudinal field study design, we collected three waves of survey data from 268 employees of a large real estate firm that was preparing for restructuring and layoffs. Consistent with our hypotheses, we found support for a mediation model in which an increase in active listening quality predicted a decrease in AJI, mediated by an increase in perceived control. Our findings suggest that in environments characterized by widespread change and impending job loss, an increase in active listening may have a ripple effect in increasing perceived control and decreasing AJI. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2021 APA, all rights reserved).