Principles and Practice of Structural Equation Modeling (2nd ed.)

An extensive body of literature theorizes public relations as two-way communication, dialogue, and relationships between organizations and their publics. Although there are alternative views, including public relations as advocacy, most theories emphasize dialogue, co-orientation, and relationships incorporating satisfaction, trust, and control mutuality—even to the extent of symmetry. Critical perspectives propose a sociocultural turn that further emphasizes stakeholders’ and societal interests. This analysis draws on a three-country study that reveals a major theory-practice gap and proposes a significant expansion of public relations theory in relation to listening to realize normative notions of public relations and give effect to claims of dialogue and engagement.

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Organizational listening: Addressing a major gap in public relations theory and practice

Listening research has not gained legitimacy as a field of study in communication primarily due to the lack of testable theories. Listening research is a challenge, as listening is performed cognit...

Building Listening Theory: The Validation of the Conversational Listening Span

While there is an important and growing body of research literature on listening, it is predominantly focused on interpersonal listening. Meanwhile, in contemporary industrial and postindustrial societies, organizations play a central role in society and the lives of citizens. People need to interact on a daily basis with government departments and agencies, corporations, and a plethora of nongovernment and nonprofit organizations. Despite theorization of the disciplinary practices of public relations and corporate, organizational, government, and political communication as two-way communication involving dialogue and engagement with stakeholders and publics, a transdisciplinary literature review of these fields reveals that little attention is paid to listening. In addition to identifying this gap in the literature, this article reports empirical research that shows organizations listen sporadically, often poorly, and sometimes not at all. To address this socially and politically significant gap, this an...

Toward a Theory and Practice of Organizational Listening

Accountants and employers of accounting graduates consider listening to be among the most important communication skills that graduates possess. However, accounting education practices that develop students' listening skills are uncommon. Further, in the case of listening development, the current approach of prescribing that educators do more to rectify students' skill deficiencies overlooks barriers that prevent greater incorporation of listening instruction in the accounting curriculum. An alternative integrated stakeholder approach to develop students' listening skills is proposed. Informed by a broad range of education literature, the approach identifies cross-disciplinary listening development best practice and barriers to the widespread implementation of such practices in the typical accounting programme, before determining and assigning interrelated listening development roles to key stakeholders who will benefit from improved student listening. While student listening development is feasible under...

Developing Accounting Students' Listening Skills: Barriers, Opportunities and an Integrated Stakeholder Approach

For more than 50 years, business professionals and some researchers have held that effective listening is a highly desirable workplace skill (Cooper, 1997; Husband, Cooper, & Monsour, 1988; Nichols & Stevens, 1957; Rogers & Rothlisberger, 1952; Sypher, 1984). However, listening as an organizational variable continues to be seen as a “soft” skill worthy of little attention in the scholarly business literature, in the business classroom, and in organizations (Flynn & Faulk, in press). This paper presents an overview of academic research on listening in the business environment and raises a number of key research questions that guided discussion of the Business Context Division of the International Forum on Listening Research. This work is designed to foster rigorous listening research among scholars in a variety of academic business fields.

Listening in the Business Context: Reviewing the State of Research

Against the backdrop of cognitive load theory (CLT) it was tested if irregular voice increases processing demands on working memory (WM). An experiment was designed to expose N = 54 participants to expository text delivered with a modal and a creaky human voice. Working memory capacity was measured by a secondary task on the visual modality. Listening to a creaky voice quality consumes more cognitive capacity as indicated by the significant decrease in secondary task performance; also, retention of information was found to be impaired. Results are explained within the framework of CLT and implications for professional communication are discussed.

Cognition and interpersonal communication: The effect of voice quality on information processing and person perception

Listening and privacy management in mobile phone conversations: cross-cultural comparison of Finnish, German, Korean and United States students

The Criminal Trial as a Speech Communication Situation

Research in psychoacoustics and public health reveals that individuals respond differently to noise, with some being more sensitive to noise than others. Given the prevalence of mobile technology a...

Tuula-Riitta Välikoski

Papers

Listening in the Business Context: Reviewing the State of Research

Cognition and interpersonal communication: The effect of voice quality on information processing and person perception

Listening and privacy management in mobile phone conversations: cross-cultural comparison of Finnish, German, Korean and United States students

The Criminal Trial as a Speech Communication Situation

The influence of individual noise sensitivity on mobile phone attitudes and behavior