A Meta-analytic Systematic Review and Theory of Perceived Listening and Job Outcomes (Performance, Relationships, Affect, and Cognition)

Employees and managers who listen well are claimed to be superior job performers across occupations and industries. Assessing the association of listening and job performance is challenging because the evidence is scattered across disciplines and there is no theory to explain it. We critically assessed this claim by proposing a theory claiming that perceived listening improves job performance through its effects on three mediators: speaker’s and listener’s positive affect, listener’s and speaker’s cognition, and relationship quality between them. To assess our proposed theory, we offer the registration of (a) a systematic review and (b) meta-analyses of the associations of listening with job performance and the three proposed mediators. For the systematic review, we consider challenges in searching databases, extraction of papers, and minimizing coder errors. For the meta-analyses, we demonstrate, with four studies, how our R code will be used to calculate inter-judge agreement, flag discrepancies between coders, correct errors, and perform three-level meta-analyses, testing our theory as well as hypotheses about potential methodological moderators.