Development and validation of the active empathetic listening scale

Abstract

This article presents a scale to measure active empathetic listening (AEL) of salespeople. AEL is defined as a form of listening practiced by salespeople in which traditional active listening is combined with empathy to achieve a higher form of listening. The AEL scale is composed of three dimensions: sensing, processing, and responding. Itemgeneration procedures and the results of three empirical studies are presented. Study 1 establishes that the item set is suitable for differentiating between effective and ineffective listeners from the point of view of customers. Study 2 determines that the item set is suitable for use by self-report of salespeople, establishes that it conforms to the three theoretical dimensions, and that it possesses convergent validity. Study 3 further refines the item set, confirms the dimensionality of the scale, and establishes that the scale possesses construct validity in the form of discriminant and nomological validity.

Active Listening Attitude Scale (ALAS): Reliability and Validity in a Nationwide Sample of Greek Educators

“…Teachers' listening skills are important not only for their interaction with their students and for the learning process (showing that they understand and care about the messages they receive), but are equally significant for a successful communication with their students' parents, through empathetic listening, asking questions, focusing on the issues at hand and finding a first step [29,41]. The use of active listening skills can help build a relationship based on trust, sincere interest and mutual respect between teachers and parents [42].…”

“…Consequently, as shown by the literature's descriptive and experimental research, the interest in active listening has spanned different fields, from marital relationship interventions [18][19][20], to counseling [21,22] and mediation [23], doctor-patient relationships [24,25], nurse-patient relationships [26,27] and even crisis management, such as hostage negotiations [28]. A vast majority of publications for more than 50 years has focused on the corporate world [12,[29][30][31][32] and on the effects of managers' active listening training on workers' mental health [16,17,32,33].…”

“…As a result, there have been studies which have focused on the development of scales assessing active listening, mainly in management (e.g., [34]), product sales (e.g., [29]), and medical services (e.g., [13]) contexts.…”

Active Empathic Listening Scale (AELS): Reliability and Validity in a Nationwide Sample of Greek Educators

“…Drollinger and colleagues (Drollinger et al 2006) described active empathetic listening as a procedure that includes three stages: (a) sensing, which refers to a listener attending to all of the explicit and implicit information expressed by the other person; (b) processing, which consists of synthesizing and remembering information in order to enable the construction of a narrative whole; and (c) responding, which involves clarification and use of verbal and nonverbal means to indicate attention. Active empathetic listening was first researched with the Active Empathetic Listening measure (AEL), which was created for use in the sales area by Drollinger and colleagues (Drollinger et al 2006) and was later adapted by Bodie for use in more general conversational settings and named Active Empathic Listening Scale (AELS) (Bodie 2011b). Both Drollinger et al (2006) and Bodie (2011b;Bodie et al 2013) presented findings that detailed a consistent and coherent factor structure for the AEL and AELS measures respectively, and provided initial evidence of convergent validity for the aforementioned scales by demonstrating that active empathic listening is related to general levels of conversational activity and self-report empathy.…”

“…Active empathetic listening was first researched with the Active Empathetic Listening measure (AEL), which was created for use in the sales area by Drollinger and colleagues (Drollinger et al 2006) and was later adapted by Bodie for use in more general conversational settings and named Active Empathic Listening Scale (AELS) (Bodie 2011b). Both Drollinger et al (2006) and Bodie (2011b;Bodie et al 2013) presented findings that detailed a consistent and coherent factor structure for the AEL and AELS measures respectively, and provided initial evidence of convergent validity for the aforementioned scales by demonstrating that active empathic listening is related to general levels of conversational activity and self-report empathy. Self-report AELS has been shown to be invariant across time (Bodie et al 2013) and associated with social skills important to the decoding of relational information (Gearhart and Bodie 2011).…”