Management and leadership

Listening in work organizations is both largely neglected by organizational behavior research, and at the same time appears, upon careful review, to cause and predict success of workers and organizations. Therefore, this chapter offers a detailed review of the associations of listening with organizational success, including job performance, employee creativity, attitudes such as job satisfaction, and perceived leadership. Next, the chapter describes the definition of listening at work. Finally, to help advance research on listening at work, the chapter considers psychological barriers and methodological opportunities. The psychological barriers include the effects of listening on the status of the listener, cross‐cultural differences, and avoidance‐attachment style. The methodological opportunities are revealed by using social relations modeling showing that listening operates largely at the dyadic level of analysis.