Listening has been reported to be an important component in judgments of communication competence in the workplace. To investigate the contributions of listening to judgments of competence, this study examined how organization members use listening and listening-related factors in judgments of communication competence across situations. The results support the notion that listening plays a central role in assessments of communication competence. Analysis reveals that listening accounts for approximately one-third of the characteristics perceivers use to evaluate communication competence in co-workers. Additionally, the results suggest organization members differ in their use of listening in judgments of competence in several kinds of situations.Scholars from a variety of disciplines have claimed that communication competence is central to effective functioning in organizations ) have observed that individuals commonly use listening or listening-related factors such as empathy to evaluate the communication competence of others. With employees engaged in some form of communication during much of their day, evaluations of the listening and speaking skills of co-workers are inevitable. Organization members frequently find themselves in situations asking questions such as: Does this person understand my position ? Will this person recall what I'm saying? Is this manager willing to hear me out? Why can't this employee listen to others? How perceivers incorporate listening factors into judgments of the communication competence of co-workers has been the focus of recent interest (Brownell, 1990; Cooper & Husband, 1993; Monge, Bachman, Dillard, & Eisenberg, 1982). As Brownell (1990) suggests, this interest is driven by the need to more precisely determine how employees perceive and evaluate the behaviors of others. For example, Monge et al. (1982) argue that individuals employ two dimensions in making competence judgments of co-workers: encoding and decoding. Others, such as Papa and Tracy (1988) report that perceivers evaluate the competence of others along a single dimension that unites speaking and listening skills. However, other scholars (e.g., Brownell, 1990; Cooper & Husband, 1993) separate listening-related factors from speaking factors in judgments of competence at UNIV OF MICHIGAN on June 26, 2015 job.sagepub.com Downloaded from

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The study of organizations has been dominated since its inception by the conceptualization of organizations as goal-attaining entities. However, the degree to which goals are consensually shared and the manner in which organizational goals are communicated remain largely unexplored. Moreover, the relationship between shared goals and organizational outcomes remains unclear. The purpose of this study was twofold. First, this study examined the relationship between shared goals and the manner in which members learn the organization's goals. Second, the relationship between shared goals and organizational outcomes was examined. The study results suggest that the degree to which goals are shared is independent of any single method of communicating goals. Additionally, although perceptions of shared goals were found to be significantly related to important organizational outcome, the extent to which organization members can articulate the shared goals was not significantly related to the organizational outcomes examined in this study.

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