Leadership Talks with Avraham (Avi) N. Kluger
Why Won’t You Listen?
- Starts:13:00, 18 March 2025
- Ends:13:45, 18 March 2025
- Location:BI - campus Oslo, room: A2-Red 13 & Zoom
- Contact:Lina Daouk-Öyry (lina.daouk-oyry@bi.no)
Abstract
When people listen well, they do better in work, marriage, parenting, negotiation, medicine, psychiatric treatment, and consulting. To explain these outcomes, Episodic Listening Theory (Kluger & Itzchakov, 2022) suggests that listening produces a virtuous dyadic cycle in which a listener increases the authenticity of the speaker, which in turn improves listening, culminating in rare moments of togetherness (good relationships). In these moments of togetherness, people tolerate paradoxes and inconsistencies and are creative. When the togetherness episode ends, people leave it with greater clarity, novel plans, heightened well-being, and a stronger attachment to the other person. These theoretical claims are consistent empirical data. For example, in the domain of work, meta-analyses indicate that the strongest correlates of listening are variables reflecting relationship quality (e.g., trust), followed by positive emotions, flexible cognitions, and superior performance, where some of these effects are based on experimental evidence (Kluger et al., 2024). In the domain of attitudes, listening causes attitudes to become more complex and less extreme (Itzchakov et al., 2017), and our new research on the effects of listening training indicates that it also increases a paradoxical mindset. Given this theory-consistent evidence, a question arises regarding why people often do not listen well. I will describe key obstacles to listening and the fledgling research supporting them, including cognitive demand, avoidance-attachment style, second-hand trauma, and resistance to change.
What is Leadership Talks?
Leadership Talks is a series of seminars about topics related to leadership, change and sustainability, project management and organizational psychology, hosted by the Department of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at BI Norwegian Business School.
About the speaker, participation through Zoom & abstract sources
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Avraham Natan (Avi) Kluger is the firstborn of parents who survived the Holocaust. He is a professor of Organizational Behavior at the Hebrew University School of Business (HUBS), Jerusalem, Israel. He has demonstrated that even positive feedback can harm performance. This research (with Angelo DeNisi) was recognized in 1996 as the Outstanding Paper in Organizational Behavior by the Academy of Management and received the first William A. Owens Scholarly Achievement Award for the best publication (1996) by the Society for Industrial and Organizational Psychology. Further, his research (with Dina Van-Dijk) on feedback sign received the 2009 Award for Best Competitive Paper by the Organizational Behavior Division of the Academy of Management. Given the dangers of feedback, which he defines as telling others something about their performance or behavior, he became interested in what happens when people listen to others instead. He has developed several listening tools, including the “Feedforward Interview” (with Dina Nir) as a substitute for performance appraisal. This approach was covered in the Chicago Tribute and the Financial Times. For details about this work, see his 2015 TEDx talk, a 2018 publication in the Harvard Business Review, and a 2022 review in the Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior. He finds his work on listening, including to Palestinians and other Arabs, as a response to the atrocities his family experienced and a contribution to his healing process.
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Join Zoom Meeting
Meeting ID: 643 9238 2847
Passcode: 801326 -
Itzchakov, G., Kluger, A. N., & Castro, D. R. (2017). I am aware of my inconsistencies but can tolerate them: The effect of high quality listening on speakers' attitude ambivalence. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 43(1), 105–120. https://doi.org/10.1177/0146167216675339
Kluger, A. N., & Itzchakov, G. (2022). The power of listening at work. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 9, 121-146. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-012420-091013
Kluger, A. N., Lehmann, M., Aguinis, H., Itzchakov, G., Gordoni, G., Zyberaj, J., & Bakaç, C. (2024). A Meta-analytic Systematic Review and Theory of the Effects of Perceived Listening on Work Outcomes. Journal of Business and Psychology, 39(2), 295-344. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10869-023-09897-5