Does avoidance‐attachment style attenuate the benefits of being listened to?

Abstract

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‐analyzed the results of the laboratory experiments and found that listening increased psychological safety on average but that the variance between the experiments was also significant. The between experiment variance in the effect of listening manipulation on psychological safety exposes a methodological challenge in choosing a research paradigm of good‐versus‐normal listening, as opposed to normal‐versus‐poor listening. More importantly, we found, as expected and across all designs, that the higher the avoidance‐attachment style was, the lower the effect of listening on psychological safety. This finding has implications both for practice and for placing a theoretical boundary on Rogers's theory.

Can high quality listening predict lower speakers' prejudiced attitudes?

“…This finding sheds further light on the listening literature, which shows that speakers also suffer from poor listening. These include reducing the quality of speakers' narration and speech fluency ( Bavelas et al, 2000 ), as well as impairing speakers' memory ( Pasupathi et al, 1998 ), psychological safety ( Castro et al, 2016 ), and their creativity ( Castro et al, 2018 ). It is possible that poor listening reduces available cognitive resources, in part, because it puts speakers in a defensive stance, and that poor listening may backfire and increase prejudice among speakers.…”

“…Implicit measures and behavioral observations of prejudice would help to validate measures of self-reported attitudinal change. In a similar vein, we focused our mediational analyses on explanations focused on fairly complex internal processes resulting from being listened to (e.g., self-insight), but the effects of listening on attitudes may be better, and more simply, explained by other proximal of listening, such as interpersonal comfort ( Williams & Irurita, 2004 ), psychological safety ( Carmeli & Gittell, 2009 ; Castro et al, 2016 ; Itzchakov et al, 2016 ), or even the valence of mood. Indeed, it is reasonable to assume that being listened to improves mood, which has downstream effects on attitudes ( Haddock et al, 1994 ).…”

Mere listening effect on creativity and the mediating role of psychological safety.

“…Listening experience. We measured listening experience with eight items rated on an 11point Likert-type scale anchored at 0 = completely disagree and 10 = completely agree (Itzchakov, Kluger & Castro, 2016) for both speaker and listener. Sample items were "The person I interacted with listened to me" and "The person I interacted with made an effort to understand what I was saying," α = .92.…”

“…Most recently, six experimental manipulations of listening increased individual level psychological safety on average by 0.45 SD (Castro et al, 2016). Furthermore, a construct related to psychological safety-(lack of) social anxiety-was consistently affected by four experimental listening manipulations , and by three quasi-experimental manipulations in an organizational setting .…”

"Checking up" on Medical Training Programs and Assessments for Foreign Trained Doctors through Multimodal Analysis

“…In another study, Castro, Kluger and Itzchakov (2015) found that active listening correlated positively with speakers' psychological safety or willingness to disclose more private information to listeners than if the listener did not display active listening characteristics. In addition, the findings of a study of counsellor trainees completed by Levitt (2001) Nursing Education in the United States were asked to complete three electronic surveys that collected data using an IPC Scale and a General Self-Efficacy Scale.…”