Karina Jade Lloyd

• Management literature over the past 60 years has highlighted the importance of effective listening in the workplace and suggested it to be a key management skill of successful leaders. Yet, little is known empirically about how effective listening affects interpersonal relationships, leader-follower interactions, and more distal work outcomes. The goal of this dissertation was to open this black box and shed light onto fundamental aspects of listening. Specifically, this research addressed the questions of how important listening is within interpersonal relationships, what kind of distal and proximal outcomes it affects, and through which underlying mechanisms it may operate. To this end, this thesis employed a multi-method approach in four empirical studies, including a zero-acquaintance paradigm, two cross-sectional questionnaire studies, and a multi-rater organizational survey study. First, the findings from a controlled setting with a student sample indicated the importance of feeling listened to for individual well-being and building positive relationships with others. Perceived listening quality was associated with trust in the partner and emotional well-being and these two listening effects were driven by distinct cognitive and socio-emotive mechanisms. Transferring these findings to the workplace, the organizational data suggested that effective listening is similarly beneficial in the dyadic leader-follower interaction in which perceived supervisor listening was positively associated with employee attitudes towards their leader, the leader-follower interaction, and the job. Most important, this study empirically examined validity criteria of supervisor listening for organizational research within the framework of leader-member exchange theory. Finally, two organizational studies demonstrated that employees’ perceptions of supervisor listening are important for three organizational outcomes: one proximal (emotional exhaustion) and two more distal (organizational citizenship behavior and turnover intentions). Furthermore, these organizational studies addressed the question of how listening affects these work outcomes and put forward evidence that suggested positive and negative affect as two distinct mediating mechanisms.