Organizational Listening for Strategic Communication

6The State of Ethical Listening to External Stakeholders in US Organizations

Marlene S. Neill and Shannon A. Bowen

DOI: 10.4324/9781003273851-9

Introduction

Scholars have identified a “crisis of listening” in companies and organizations today with “an average speaking to listening ratio of 80:20” (Macnamara, 2016a, pp. 133,140). Similarly, recent studies have found that communication professionals “value listening, but do not always make it the priority that it merits” (Neill & Bowen, 2021, p. 276). As listening receives more attention in communication scholarship, researchers have stressed that organizational listening should be not only ethical but also strategic. As Lewis (2020) pointed out, collecting information does not result in strategic ...