Chapter 10
TRUE-FALSE
T F 1. Only listening and questioning provide the ongoing feedback to negotiate what verbal
and nonverbal messages mean.
T F 2. Vigilance is relatively easy to achieve.
T F 3. Information overload and anxiety may keep you from retaining what you hear.
T F 4. People often don’t listen to others because they stereotype them and assume they have
nothing to say.
T F 5. In defensive climates, people often listen only to get something with which to score
points.
T F 6. Norms for good listening either develop naturally or they don’t develop at all.
T F 7. Empathic listening is strictly for one-on-one helping relationships, not for a team’s
transactional processes.
T F 8. Students who are good listeners achieve grades better than their standardized I.Q.
tests predict.
T F 9. You can use your listening and questioning to help make turn-taking work effectively
in a team.
T F 10. Organizations have shown little interest in training employees to be better listeners.
T F 11. The type of listening that should go on in a group is monologic listening.
T F 12. In dialogical listening, participants immerse themselves in creating and developing
ideas together.
T F 13. The way questions are phrased can contribute to a defensive or a supportive climate.
T F 14. The leader alone is responsible for ensuring vigilance in cooperative analysis.
T F 15. Organizations today consider listening skills to be the least of their concerns in
selecting and promoting employees.
T F 16. According to Stewart and Thomas, in dialogic listening the participants infer internal
‘psychic’ states from the talk.
T F 17. Good teams can communicate freely without worrying about taking turns or being
sure every member gets to speak.
T F 18. One approach to listening is to ask, “What’s in it for me?”
T F 19. When you listen actively, you are silent but strongly involved in listening to the
speaker and in giving nonverbal feedback.
T F 20. A good questioner can weave two or three issues into one question.
MULTIPLE CHOICE
1. You observe a meeting in which the leader presents a proposal to a committee. The
members listen silently and then begin to argue about the proposal. What best describes
their process?
A. Empathic listening and questioning
B. Dialogical listening and questioning
2. Cara listens to her teammate until he refers to women as “girls.” She stops listening, leans
forward impatiently, and finally breaks in to say, “You shouldn’t call women girls. If you
weren’t such a male chauvinist pig, you’d know…” Cara is:
A. Listening and questioning dialogically
B. Providing empathic feedback
3. If your team is off track and not paying attention to a member who is speaking, a good way
to help is by:
D. Any of the above
E. None of the above
4. Which of the following is not a good rule for asking questions?
A. Ask questions that help the speaker.
E. All of the above (None are good)
5. Maria says, “I see our problem as rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic…” Diana
responds, “You think our ship is sinking and we’re fiddling around with irrelevant details? I
guess you’re right. Maybe we ought to be getting the lifeboats ready. What do we do to get
them into the water?” Is Diana:
A. Using dialogical listening and questioning?
B. Paraphrasing plus?
6. When you focus on helping the speaker give clear, accurate information and analysis and
you ask questions for clarification, explanation, and detail, you are engaged in:
D. Dialogical listening
7. When members’ listening helps to ensure that their transactional processes are meeting both
individual and team needs and helps identify personal and/or interpersonal issues as they
impact on the team or the task, they are using:
A. Active listening
8. You are listening to a teammate who has rambled on about disadvantages to several
different proposed solutions. According to the authors’ criteria, which of the following
would be a good way to ask for clarification?
A. “Could you please get to the point?”
B. Well, my own position is that we should adopt solution A. You haven’t really said
anything against it.
9. Which of the following involves a preparation for starting to engage in active listening?
A. Make a commitment to listen.
B. Get set physically for listening.
10. Which of the following statements is true about listening and questioning skills?
A. Organizations rank these skills as highly important for their employees.
B. Students with good listening abilities get higher grades than their standardized IQ
scores would predict.
ESSAYS
1. Draw a diagram or model that shows how listening and questioning are essential to a team’s
dialogue, climate, cooperative analysis, and success. Explain your model, using an example to
show how it works in practice.
2. Describe a team (hypothetical or real) that uses poor listening and questioning. Then discuss
what that team could do to improve its active, interactive, empathic, and dialogical listening and
questioning.
3. Suppose that you have a friend who wants to develop leadership skills. Write that person a
letter, explaining how she or he can use leadership to facilitate listening and questioning
transactions in a group or team.