LISTENING COMPETENCE AND COMMUNICATIVE COMPETENCE

Confident individuals listen to message content better than individuals who lack confidence (Clark, 1989).
People with less confidence in themselves tend to be better listeners for the emotional meaning of the spoken message (Clark, 1989).
Being more willing to communicate and less apprehensive about listening and speaking is an indicator of better listening comprehension (Clark, 1989).

When learning a foreign language, one’s grammar improves if one learns to listen to the language prior to speaking it (Benson, & Heilt, 1978).

Both business practitioners and academics listed listening as one of the most important skills for an effective professional, yet only 1.5% of articles in business journals dealt with listening effectiveness (Smeltzer, 1993).

Individuals agree less on the ratings of good listeners, but agree more on the ratings of poor listeners (Cooper & Buchanan, 2003).
Listening accounts for approximately 1/3 of the characteristics perceivers use to evaluate communication competence in co-workers (Arnold, 1995).

Listening and listening-related abilities such as understanding, open-mindedness, and supportiveness constitute the single dimension upon which people make judgments about communication competence (Wienmann, 1977).

An individual’s willingness to listen is positively correlated with communication skills and negatively related to receiver apprehension and sender based communication apprehension (Roberts & Vinson, 1998).

Listening is an important component in how people judge communicative competence in the workplace (Haas & Arnold, 1995). Further, individual performance in an organization is found to be directly related to listening ability or perceived listening effectiveness (Haas & Arnold, 1995)

LISTENING AND MEANING
Spoken words only account for 30 -35% of the meaning. The rest is transmitted through nonverbal communication that only can be detected through visual and auditory listening (Birdwhistell, 1970).

LISTENING AND MEMORY
On average, viewers who just watched and listened to the evening news could only recall 17.2% of the content when not cued, and the cued group never exceeded 25% (Stauffer, Frost, & Rybolt, 1983).

In a linear one-way listening task, when presented with a list of words, people can remember, on average, 7 items (Miller, 1956).

When presented with a series of unrelated sentences and asked to remember the last word of each sentence, people can remember, on average, 2.805 items (Janusik, 2004).

In a dynamic, conversational listening task, where people must remember a series of related questions and respond to them, people can remember and respond to 2.946 items (Janusik, 2004).

LISTENING AND SPEECH RATES
The average person talks at a rate of about 125 – 175 words per minute, while we can listen at a rate of up to 450 words per minute (Carver, Johnson, & Friedman, 1970).

LISTENING AND HEARING
For statistics about hearing disorders, ear infections, and deafness, see the National Institute on Deafness and Other Disorders website at http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/statistics/hearing.asp and http://deafness.about.com/cs/earbasics/a/demographics.htm.

LISTENING AND LEADERS
Listening is tied to effective leadership (Bechler & Johnson, 1995; Johnson & Bechler, 1998).

Leaders give good attention to the speaker by looking the speaker in the eye (Orick, 2002).

Leaders paraphrase the speaker to ensure understanding of the speaker’s message (Orick, 2002).

Leaders are able to relate accurate messages to a third party, which shows that they listening to and remembered what the original speaker had said (Orick, 2002).

Leaders listen with an open mind by not becoming emotional or defensive (Orick, 2002).

Leaders can listen to a speaker and be respectful by not betraying the confidence of the speaker when asked to do so (Orick, 2002).

LISTENING STYLES
People listen through one of four primary styles, including people oriented, time oriented, action oriented and content oriented. Females are more likely to be people-oriented and males are more likely to be action, content, or time oriented (Barker & Watson, 2000).

40 % of individuals choose to listen with two or more distinct styles (Weaver, Richendoller, & Kirtley, 1995).

One’s schema, agentic or communal, is a better predictor of listening style preference than one’s gender (Johnson, Weaver, Watson, & Barker, 2000).

Those with a high people-orientation have a low apprehension for receiving information (Bodie & Villaume, 2003).