Communication Structures That Hold Us Hostage: Conceptualizing Unlistening as an Organizational Practice

Abstract

Listening is central to organizational life, yet many employees report persistent experiences of not being genuinely heard. This study conceptualizes such experiences as organizational unlistening and examines how they are socially coordinated and sustained despite rhetorical commitments to listening. Drawing on critical and sociocultural communication traditions and using Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) theory, the research analyzed 18 semi-structured interviews with employees. Thematic analysis identified a set of patterned communicative practices that normalize unlistening, including ritualized responsiveness, selective resonance, and symbolic legitimacy, showing how organizations structure what is heard and by whom. These findings reveal unlistening as an active, power-laden organizational practice that reinforces communicative closure and knowledge inequalities. They position unlistening as a distinct construct in business communication and emphasize the need for reflexive, system-level approaches to responsiveness that address communicative closure and sustain employee engagement.

Introduction

Despite extensive scholarship linking listening to leadership competence (Brownell, 2012), employee engagement and commitment (Puusa & Ala-Kortesmaa, 2019), ethical responsiveness (Lipari, 2014), and organizational identity (Cheney & Christensen, 2001), organizational life continues to be marked by experiences in which employees do not feel heard. This enduring disconnect reveals the gap between the normative value attributed to listening in research and its inconsistent enactment in practice. Addressing this tension requires moving beyond individual skill or managerial disposition to examine the communication structures that constrain listening and reproduce organizational silence. Integrative reviews confirm this disconnect: Yip and Fisher (2022) note that while listening is consistently linked to positive outcomes, organizational research remains fragmented and often fails to address structural constraints. Contemporary studies further show that employee listening programs frequently stall when feedback is collected but not acted upon, eroding trust and engagement (Fonseca, 2025; Perceptyx, 2025).

These dynamics become especially evident in expert organizations, which are characterized by their legitimacy and core activities being grounded in specialized professional knowledge (Puusa & Ala-Kortesmaa, 2019), such as consulting firms, technology companies, public administration bodies, universities, and expert-intensive service organizations. In these contexts, employees are expected to contribute specialized knowledge, exercise professional judgment, and participate in decision-making processes. Compared to more standardized or routine-based organizations, expert organizations often explicitly value openness, dialog, and being “heard” as part of their identity. Listening is therefore both a communicative skill and a symbolic marker of organizational modernity and professionalism.

Recent work on organizational listening competency emphasizes that knowledge-intensive organizations face heightened expectations to demonstrate participatory listening, yet employees often perceive these efforts as symbolic rather than substantive (Kang & Moon, 2024). Empirical studies and everyday organizational experiences also repeatedly point to a tension between how listening is talked about and how it is experienced (Flynn et al., 2006; Shotter, 2009). Employees’ concerns are formally acknowledged and documented, but no meaningful response or change follows. In such cases, they may perceive listening as absent, despite the presence of meetings, feedback systems, surveys, or managerial affirmations that signal attentiveness. Consequently, perceiving listening as absent is strongly associated with burnout, reduced identification, and diminished organizational trust (Kim & Wang, 2024; Weiss & Zacher, 2025). This apparent absence, however, does not mean that listening disappears. Instead, listening becomes performative: it is enacted in recognizable communicative forms while being decoupled from responsiveness or action.

This article conceptualizes this phenomenon as unlistening. Unlistening refers to a patterned organizational practice in which receptivity is symbolically displayed through talk, routines, and procedures while alternative interpretations, critiques, or actions are rendered unintelligible, inappropriate, or risky. For example, an employee may be encouraged to “speak openly” during a development discussion, only to find later that raising concerns is interpreted as resistance, a lack of professionalism, or a poor fit. In such moments, listening becomes a mechanism that maintains institutional order while limiting the consequences of being heard. This conceptualization of unlistening resonates with recent calls to examine listening as an organizational logic rather than an interpersonal skill, where receptivity is staged but responsiveness is constrained (Macnamara, 2022; Randall Brandt & Donohue, 2024).

Building on critical listening studies (Dobson, 2014; Lipari, 2014) and organizational discourse theory (Alvesson & Kärreman, 2011; Putnam et al., 2005), this study situates unlistening as a culturally embedded and communicatively accomplished organizational phenomenon. It is not an individual failure or communicative deficit, but a patterned practice sustained through discourse and institutional routines.

Understanding unlistening as an organizational logic opens a critical gap in business communication research. While listening is often framed as an interpersonal skill or managerial competency (Brownell, 2012; Wolvin, 2010), far less attention has been given to how organizations design, perform, and regulate listening through communicative routines and structures. This study addresses that gap by examining how employees experience listening as ritualized, selective, and risk-laden, and how these patterns sustain legitimacy while limiting the consequences of being heard. In doing so, it responds to calls for an “architecture of listening” oriented to systemic responsiveness (Macnamara, 2015, 2022) and complements recent work showing that listening initiatives can become symbolic when follow-through is lacking (Fonseca, 2025; KPMG, 2022; Yip & Fisher, 2025).

Drawing on interviews with employees in Finnish expert organizations, the analysis uses Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) theory (Pearce, 2007) to illuminate how moral orders, relational expectations, and patterned interactions shape what counts as “listening” in practice and how unlistening is reproduced in everyday organizational life.

By foregrounding employees’ lived experiences, the study contributes to business communication scholarship by reframing listening as an institutional practice rather than an interpersonal skill. This perspective clarifies why well-intentioned listening initiatives, such as feedback surveys, open forums, and engagement campaigns, often fail to generate trust, participation, or change: they operate within communicative architectures that privilege symbolic receptivity over responsiveness (Macnamara, 2022; Perceptyx, 2025; Tourish, 2020). Understanding unlistening, therefore, offers communication professionals and managers a sharper lens for diagnosing why listening efforts falter and how organizational communication might be redesigned to support more genuine responsiveness.

Reframing Listening in Organizational Life: Between Ideals and Practices

Much of the business and management literature approaches listening as an individual competency, emphasizing its trainability, measurability, and evaluability through leadership development programs, performance appraisals, and communication training (Covey, 2004; Nichols & Stevens, 1957). In everyday organizational contexts, this framing is evident in practices such as “active listening” workshops, managerial guidelines for one-on-one discussions, and feedback models that emphasize eye contact, paraphrasing, and empathetic responses. Recent syntheses argue that this competency-based framing fragments listening research, leaving structural and systemic dimensions underexplored (Yip & Fisher, 2022). In other words, listening is often treated as a skill deficit rather than a practice embedded in organizational power relations.

At the same time, listening is increasingly mobilized as a form of strategic performance in organizational life. Leaders may emphasize openness by inviting employees’ input in meetings or conducting engagement surveys. Studies of employee listening programs show that feedback is often collected but not integrated into decision-making, undermining trust and engagement (Damonte et al., 2023; Perceptyx, 2025). In such cases, listening becomes a communicative display that signals attentiveness without altering organizational priorities.

Emerging critical and dialogic scholarship challenges these instrumental framings by emphasizing that listening is not inherently virtuous or neutral, but socially situated and structured by power (Dobson, 2014; Lipari, 2014; Shotter, 2009). In organizational settings, listening can function less as a pathway to responsiveness and more as a communicative resource that stabilizes managerial authority. Critical organizational communication research shows that practices framed as participatory may simultaneously foreclose meaningful responsiveness (Putnam et al., 2005), and recent studies on listening competency indicate that employees often experience listening initiatives as symbolic rather than substantive (Kang & Moon, 2024). This dynamic aligns with Bickford’s (1996) argument that listening can contain dissent, Couldry’s (2010) critique of voice as a symbolic resource for authority, and Alvesson and Kärreman’s (2011) account of how discourse reproduces managerial control. Together, these perspectives illuminate how symbolic attentiveness can validate dominant interpretations while limiting the consequences of being heard: an insight that underpins the conceptualization of unlistening developed in this article. This dynamic is not only theorized but also reflected in empirical research: Ala-Kortesmaa (2023) shows that supportive listening can simultaneously foster resilience and reinforce exclusion, highlighting the ambivalent effects of attentiveness in practice. Extending this insight to institutional settings, Ala-Kortesmaa and Valikoski (2024) demonstrate how listening practices within mediation contexts can reproduce systemic constraints, illustrating how organizational routines can ritualize listening into forms of unlistening. Taken together, these studies reinforce the argument that listening can operate as a discursive resource that stabilizes authority while constraining critique.

Responding to calls within business communication to examine the less visible dynamics of organizational inattention, this study focuses on how voices, concerns, and interpretations are rendered inaudible even in contexts that publicly valorize listening (Couldry, 2010; Crawford, 2021; Tourish, 2020). While research on strategic silence shows that employees and leaders may withhold concerns until conditions are safer (Parke et al., 2022; Westover, 2024), far less attention has been given to the organizational practices that perform listening while limiting the consequences of being heard. This article conceptualizes these practices as unlistening, a dynamic in which attentiveness is staged but responsiveness is constrained. As Macnamara (2015) notes, such practices create the appearance of openness, and as Alvesson and Kärreman (2011) argue, they can deflect critique and narrow the scope of possible action. Unlistening, therefore, directs analytical attention to the communicative architectures that manage dissent while preserving institutional legitimacy.

Examining how unlistening operates in expert organizations, this article contributes to business communication scholarship by reframing listening as a discursive and organizational process rather than an individual skill. This perspective clarifies how communication practices regulate inclusion, authority, and resistance in everyday organizational life, and why well-intentioned listening initiatives may inadvertently reproduce the power structures they aim to challenge. Practitioner studies show that organizations with mature listening systems are more likely to achieve business and talent objectives, underscoring the need to move beyond symbolic listening (KPMG, 2022; Perceptyx, 2025). Recognizing these dynamics helps managers and communication professionals understand why listening programs often falter despite their visibility in organizational routines.

Communication, Power, and the Organizational Practice of Unlistening

Contemporary organizational theory, particularly within the Constitutive Communication of Organization (CCO) perspective, increasingly understands communication as a constitutive force through which organizational life is enacted and stabilized (Ashcraft et al., 2009; Putnam & Nicotera, 2009). Everyday practices such as meetings, evaluations, and informal conversations shape organizational identities, define norms of participation, and determine which contributions are considered legitimate. In this sense, communication regulates voice and power: decisions about which concerns are acknowledged and how responses are framed are accomplished through routine interaction rather than explicit commands. As Mumby (2001) notes, dominant meanings become normalized through communication, while alternative interpretations are marginalized; Alvesson and Kärreman (2011) similarly show how managerial discourse “seduces” members into accepting prevailing priorities as common sense. Recent organizational communication research confirms that discursive routines continue to shape authority in hybrid and digital workplaces, where communicative structures rather than explicit directives regulate participation (Schoeneborn et al., 2019).

Research on organizational silence and employee voice has highlighted how individuals may withhold input due to fear of consequences, perceptions of futility, or professional norms (Morrison & Milliken, 2000; Pinder & Harlos, 2001). However, this literature often emphasizes the speaker’s choice, leaving less attention to how organizations themselves filter, redirect, or neutralize what is said. Studies on employee silence demonstrate that organizational responsiveness is actively structured, with managerial framing and selective uptake shaping whether employee voice is legitimized or neutralized (Kim & Wang, 2024; Weiss & Zacher, 2025). Situating unlistening within this conversation shifts the focus from individual silence to the communicative structures that systematically delimit responsiveness.

Building on Deetz’s (1992) notion of symbolic containment, referring to the idea that organizations manage dissent by appearing open while constraining transformative change, unlistening can be understood as a communicative strategy that enables organizations to appear open and participatory while limiting the transformative potential of employee voice. Recent practitioner reports warn that employee listening programs often fail when feedback loops lack accountability, leading to symbolic participation rather than substantive change (Damonte et al., 2023; Perceptyx, 2025). In this way, unlistening extends business communication scholarship by reframing listening as a patterned organizational logic embedded in routines of responsiveness.

This conceptualization of unlistening resonates with recent work on the ethics of inattention, where Crawford (2021) shows how organizations normalize not-listening as a moral stance that legitimizes exclusion. In parallel, Moisander et al. (2016) note that sustaining organizational ignorance requires ongoing discursive and procedural effort, while Shotwell (2016) discusses the affective labor involved in maintaining it. Taken together, these perspectives illuminate how unlistening is an active, ethically charged, and emotionally sustained practice that preserves institutional legitimacy. Scholarship on organizational ignorance highlights how communicative practices deliberately sustain “unknowing” to protect authority, linking ignorance to emotional and moral labor (Roberts, 2013).

The conceptualization of unlistening as a patterned organizational practice that absorbs critique while preserving legitimacy also aligns with feminist and postcolonial critiques that challenge liberal assumptions of equal participation, highlighting how listening is unevenly distributed and politically charged (Bickford, 1996; Dreher, 2009; Spivak, 1988). In practice, contributions from marginalized employees may be acknowledged but reframed as resistance, or critical perspectives may be symbolically included without influencing decisions. Recent diversity and inclusion research confirms that marginalized voices are often formally included but substantively sidelined, reinforcing organizational hierarchies (Janssens & Steyaert, 2020; Nkomo, 2021).

By situating unlistening at the intersection of communication and power, this article expands business communication scholarship to show how organizational responsiveness is structured and patterned. Unlistening organizes attention, protects authority, and regulates the boundaries of what can be meaningfully said and heard at work. For scholars, this reframing highlights unlistening as a communicative architecture of control and legitimacy; for practitioners, it explains why feedback initiatives often fail to produce change even when participation appears robust.

Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) and the Discursive Logic of Unlistening

To analyze the discursive infrastructure of unlistening, this study draws on Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) theory (Pearce, 2007; Pearce & Cronen, 1980). CMM conceptualizes communication as a layered process of meaning-making through which social realities are co-constructed. Communication simultaneously produces actions, relationships, identities, and moral expectations, all embedded within broader institutional and cultural contexts.

A central contribution of CMM is its emphasis on recurring patterns that feel normal, appropriate, and difficult to disrupt. Pearce (2007) describes these as moral orders: implicit frameworks that define which actions, responses, and interpretations are considered legitimate. From a business communication perspective, this emphasis helps explain why communicative practices persist even when they appear ethically problematic or functionally ineffective.

Core CMM Concepts Relevant to Unlistening

• Stories told and stories lived: Pearce and Cronen (1980) distinguish between public narratives that emphasize openness and participation and lived practices that may deflect critique or postpone response. In organizational contexts, this distinction reveals symbolic unlistening, where attentiveness is displayed (e.g., affirming language in meetings) without substantive engagement.

• Moral orders: These implicit rules shape who is entitled to speak, whose knowledge counts, and under what conditions listening is warranted. In expert organizations, moral orders often privilege managerial rationality, emotional restraint, and alignment with strategic priorities. Expressions that are critical or disruptive may therefore be treated as unprofessional, making them prime candidates for unlistening.

• Logical force and deontic logic: Together, these concepts explain the pressures and obligations that sustain unlistening. Logical force refers to the felt pressure to respond in ways consistent with one’s role, while deontic logic frames what is obligatory, permitted, or forbidden. For example, middle managers may feel compelled to acknowledge employee concerns verbally yet avoid action, interpreting inaction as loyalty or procedural fairness. Unlistening thus emerges through coordinated expectations about permissible responses.

CMM as an Analytic Lens

In this study, CMM provides an analytic framework for examining how organizational actors coordinate meaning around listening and unlistening. Its focus on stories, moral orders, logical force, and deontic logic enables attention to how expectations, norms, and interpretive frameworks shape what kinds of responses become intelligible within organizational communication. CMM is particularly useful for analyzing how patterns of interaction are sustained over time and how participants orient to what they believe they “ought” to do in specific situations. This orientation allows the analysis to trace how communicative practices are patterned, how specific responses become preferred or dispreferred, and how organizational norms influence the range of actions perceived as appropriate. Extensions of CMM highlight its relevance for organizational ethics and dialog, emphasizing how communicative patterns both enable and constrain responsiveness in workplace settings (Cronen, 2006).

While CMM has been applied to organizational, conflict, and intercultural communication (Pearce, 2007; Spano, 2001), its potential for analyzing listening, and especially unlistening, has received limited attention. Here, CMM is used to demonstrate how unlistening functions as an institutionally coherent discourse practice: a strategic displacement of listening through coordinated meaning-making. This perspective highlights how organizational actors simultaneously participate in and are constrained by communicative patterns that marginalize voice, legitimize disengagement, and obscure power asymmetries under the guise of openness and rationality. For business communication practitioners, this lens reveals why familiar tools such as surveys or feedback protocols often fail to generate genuine responsiveness, and how rethinking these practices could open space for more authentic engagement.

Analytical Orientation and Methodological Positioning

This study is situated at the intersection of the critical and sociocultural communication traditions, which together enable an examination of listening as a structurally embedded, culturally patterned, and power-laden organizational practice. The sociocultural tradition (e.g., Carbaugh, 2007; Philipsen, 1992) highlights how communicative practices construct shared meanings and norms, positioning listening as a situated practice that reflects and reinforces local expectations. The critical tradition (e.g., Deetz, 1992; Mumby, 2012) foregrounds how communication reproduces and contests institutional ideologies and symbolic power, drawing attention to how some perspectives are amplified while others are marginalized.

Integrating these traditions enables analysis of how unlistening operates within taken-for-granted routines, contributing to both communicative stability and institutional inertia. This positioning aligns with business communication research that examines how organizational structures manage and contain voice. Mechanisms such as leadership communication, surveys, and feedback systems may signal openness while enacting selective attention or symbolic closure. Situating unlistening within these dynamics clarifies how communicative openness can be publicly performed yet substantively deflected. This orientation provides the conceptual foundation for the qualitative research design outlined below, which centers on employees’ lived experiences of listening and unlistening in expert organizations and helps explain why initiatives that appear participatory often struggle to generate meaningful change.

Methods

This study employs a qualitative research design to examine communicative practices in expert organizations. In-depth thematic interviews with employees from three Finnish expert organizations provide data on everyday work interactions. The methodological approach is interpretive and discourse-oriented, focusing on meaning-making, organizational norms, and power relations as they are enacted through communication. This design enables analysis of listening as an organizational practice, contributing to business communication scholarship on voice, participation, and institutional power.

Research Problem and Research Questions

Despite the widespread rhetorical emphasis on listening in contemporary expert organizations, employees frequently report experiences of not being genuinely heard. While business communication and organizational research have illuminated employee voice and silence (Morrison & Milliken, 2000; Pinder & Harlos, 2001), it has tended to emphasize speaking or withholding speech rather than listening itself. Much less attention has been paid to how listening itself is enacted, performed, and strategically constrained within everyday organizational communication. This gap gives rise to the central research problem:

• RP. How is unlistening communicatively constructed and sustained in expert organizations?

To address this problem, the study investigates the following research questions:

• RQ1. How do organizational members describe unlistening practices in their daily work?

This question explores how employees narrate and interpret situations in which their input is acknowledged symbolically but not meaningfully taken up.

• RQ2. What organizational structures, norms, and power relations are understood to shape these listening practices?

This question examines how organizational conditions, such as institutional scripts, discursive norms, and hierarchical expectations, enable or constrain listening, illuminating the communicative mechanisms through which authority is maintained and dissent is managed in expert organizations.

• RQ3. Why do patterns of unlistening persist despite organizational rhetoric that emphasizes the importance of listening?

This question investigates how unlistening serves organizational functions, such as symbolic legitimacy, emotional containment, and normative alignment, and why these practices are reproduced rather than challenged through everyday communication.

Together, these questions enable a multi-level analysis of unlistening as discourse, organizational practice, and a form of power, contributing to a more critical understanding of listening within business and organizational communication.

Data Collection and Participants

The empirical material for this study consists of 18 semi-structured interviews with employees from three Finnish expert organizations operating in engineering consultancy, health and welfare policy, and information services. These organizations were selected because they rely heavily on knowledge-intensive work and place a strong rhetorical emphasis on participatory communication, dialog, and listening, making them particularly relevant sites for examining tensions between listening ideals and lived communicative practices in contemporary organizations.

Participants (nine women, six men, two non-binary individuals, and one participant who chose not to disclose their gender; ages 28–58, M = 42.3) were recruited through purposive and snowball sampling. All participants occupied mid-level employee or senior specialist roles without executive authority. With an average organizational tenure of 9.4 years (range: 2–24 years), participants demonstrated extensive familiarity with their organizations’ internal communication practices, feedback systems, and leadership routines.

Interviews were conducted in Finnish by the author between October 2024 and April 2025, either face-to-face or via secure video conferencing platforms, at the participants’ preference. Eighteen interviews, each lasting 60 to 90 min, yielded approximately 23.5 hr of recorded material. All interviews were audio-recorded with participants’ consent, transcribed verbatim, and anonymized. The final dataset comprises 338 single-spaced pages of textual data.

Interview Procedure

Semi-structured interviews began with broad questions about participants’ experiences with organizational communication, followed by targeted prompts regarding listening and unlistening practices. Example questions included, for instance: “Can you describe a situation where you felt your input was heard or ignored?” and “How do formal routines, like meetings or surveys, shape your ability to speak up?” The interview guide consisted of open-ended prompts designed to elicit reflections on communication culture, management practices, and experiences of listening and voice, with particular attention to episodes in which listening was symbolically enacted or in which discrepancies emerged between stated organizational values and lived experience. Interviews were conversational, allowing participants to elaborate on specific incidents, provide illustrative examples, and offer broader interpretive accounts of how listening functioned within their organizations. Follow-up questions probed ambiguities, clarified meanings, and explored underlying motivations, yielding rich, contextually grounded narratives for analysis.

Data Translation and Management

All interviews were conducted in Finnish and translated into English prior to analysis. Translation was carried out by a bilingual researcher familiar with both the organizational context and listening scholarship, ensuring accuracy and preserving nuanced meaning. Minor adjustments were made to convey culturally specific expressions while maintaining participants’ original intent. Translating prior to coding enabled consistent analysis of all transcripts in English and mitigated potential bias introduced by post hoc translation. Language considerations were carefully managed to ensure that conceptual interpretations, particularly regarding unlistening practices, reflected participants’ authentic experiences.

Data Analysis

The analysis followed a qualitative, interpretive approach that combined reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006) with attention to how participants narrated and made sense of listening and unlistening in organizational contexts. The analytic focus addressed both what participants described and how they constructed meaning through stories, metaphors, and evaluative language.

Phase 1: Familiarization and Inductive Coding

Analysis began with immersive familiarization. Each transcript was read multiple times to identify moments of emotional intensity, ambiguity, or contradiction, particularly where participants’ experiences diverged from organizational rhetoric emphasizing openness. Inductive open coding was conducted line by line, closely reflecting participants’ own wording and imagery. For example, descriptions of meetings as “a theater of caring” informed codes such as performative empathy, while phrases like “not bothering anymore” or “safe only when quiet” contributed to codes such as listening fatigue, avoidance, and strategic silence. Multiple codes were assigned to the same excerpt when needed to preserve complexity. Attention was also given to recurring organizational scripts (formal and informal routines that shaped expectations for communication and responsiveness), especially where participants’ accounts contradicted these scripts.

Phase 2: Pattern Identification and Thematic Clustering

After open coding, the analysis shifted toward identifying recurring patterns across the dataset. Codes reflecting similar underlying logics (e.g., “they nod and move on,” “nothing ever changes,” “we keep circling”) were grouped into preliminary thematic clusters. Patterns were examined in relation to organizational routines such as feedback sessions, meetings, and dialog initiatives, revealing how unlistening practices were embedded in institutional practices and procedural norms. Reflexive memos documented cross-cutting dynamics, including emotional labor, symbolic compliance, and selective resonance, and helped distinguish between widespread and context-specific patterns.

Phase 3: Theoretical Sensitization Using CMM

Conceptual guidance from Coordinated Management of Meaning (CMM) theory (Pearce, 2007; Pearce & Cronen, 1980) was then introduced as a sensitizing lens rather than a coding framework. Concepts such as episodes, moral orders, logical force, and stories told versus stories lived helped interpret how organizational scripts shaped participants’ perceptions of acceptable communication. Comparing participants’ accounts with these scripts made visible contradictions between espoused openness and patterned practices that neutralized dissent or limited the influence of employee input. This phase clarified how the symbolic, moral, and procedural dimensions intersected, constraining communicative alternatives.

Phase 4: Moral Orders, Constraint, and Persistence

CMM’s notion of moral orders was used to interpret participants’ descriptions of implicit expectations to remain “constructive,” “professional,” or “rational.” These norms functioned as boundary markers regulating whose concerns were considered legitimate. The concept of logical force illuminated how employees and managers felt compelled to “hear but not act” or “stay neutral” due to role expectations, loyalty, or hierarchy. These mechanisms informed the refinement of themes by highlighting how unlistening was reproduced through socially coordinated inaction.

Phase 5: Thematic Refinement and Critical Interpretation

In the final phase, themes were refined for coherence and explanatory power. Particular attention was paid to how patterns of unlistening contributed to communicative asymmetry and organizational power. For example, the theme “symbolic containment of critique” emerged from narratives in which concerns were repeatedly “acknowledged but not answered” or “absorbed and forgotten,” interpreted in relation to Deetz’s (1992) concept of symbolic containment and Pearce’s (2007) notion of “patterns that hold us hostage.” Reflexive memos and an audit trail documented interpretive decisions, supporting analytic rigor. Taken together, the analysis demonstrates how listening operates as an organizational communication practice with symbolic, moral, and political dimensions, and how unlistening becomes patterned and professionally sanctioned in everyday organizational life.

Ethical Considerations

This study adhered to the ethical principles of the Finnish National Board on Research Integrity (TENK, 2019). No approval from the Tampere University ethics committee was required. All participants received written information about the study, provided informed consent, and were informed of their right to withdraw at any time without consequence. Anonymity was ensured by removing identifying details from transcripts and using pseudonyms in all published materials. Given the potentially sensitive nature of discussing internal organizational practices and leadership behaviors, special care was taken to create a respectful and nonjudgmental interview atmosphere. Participants were reminded that they could decline to answer any question or stop the interview at any point. Data storage followed EU GDPR protocols. Throughout the research process, reflexive journaling was used to mitigate interpretive bias and remain attentive to the ethical implications of power and representation.

My positionality shaped both the conduct and interpretation of this study. Professional familiarity with Finnish organizational contexts and fluency in Finnish and English facilitated rapport with participants and sensitivity to culturally specific expressions of listening and unlistening. My academic background in interpersonal communication, listening, and discourse studies informed the analytic lens. To enhance transparency, I engaged in reflexive journaling and documented interpretive decisions in analytic memos, acknowledging that findings emerged through interaction between researcher and participants rather than as neutral discoveries.

Results

Perceptions of Unlistening Practices in Daily Work

The first research question asked how organizational members describe unlistening in their everyday work interactions. Across interviews, participants consistently framed listening as a socially regulated, patterned practice embedded in organizational expectations, relational norms, and emotional labor. Three interrelated description themes emerged: ritualized responsiveness, emotional shielding, and managing appearances.

Ritualized Responsiveness

Participants frequently described situations where unlistening was enacted through scripted gestures that simulated attentiveness without enabling meaningful action. Meetings, feedback sessions, and one-on-one discussions often included nodding, paraphrasing, or brief verbal acknowledgments that maintained the appearance of listening while deflecting substantive engagement:

“We go through the motions in meetings. People say ‘I hear you,’ but it feels like no one listens.” (P05)

“It’s like we’re all just going through the same moves. . . listening feels performative.” (P12)

“You know they’re paying attention on paper, but after the meeting, nothing changes. It’s just for show.” (P09)

These accounts show how organizational scripts and cultural expectations institutionalize unlistening by privileging symbolic gestures over substantive dialog. In this way, ritualized responsiveness normalizes participation as performance, signaling to employees that attentiveness is valued more for its appearance than for its capacity to generate change.

Emotional Shielding

Participants described withdrawing from communication in response to ritualized responsiveness and repeated experiences of unlistening. Rather than a sign of disengagement, this withdrawal served as a deliberate strategy to manage emotional labor, moral ambiguity, and compassion fatigue. Participants framed these choices as conscious boundary-setting rather than passive avoidance:

“Sometimes it feels safer not to communicate and listen fully. . . so you don’t have to carry the weight of it all.” (P07)

“If you hear too much, it can overwhelm you. So you sort of train yourself not to take it in.” (P14)

“I choose when to engage deeply because some discussions leave you drained for days. It’s about protecting your own energy.” (P11)

These reflections reveal how employees regulate their attention and emotional resources, enacting emotional shielding through silence and passiveness. As employees withdraw selectively, some perspectives become less audible, and the overall energy available for collaboration and feedback diminishes.

Managing Appearances

Finally, participants described unlistening as a normative performance tied to professionalism, credibility, and role legitimacy. Employees often engaged in symbolic listening to align with organizational expectations, signaling openness without committing to follow-up:

“Listening is something you do to appear professional, not actually to take things forward.” (P03)

“It’s about managing appearances, like we’re doing our job, but real concerns don’t always get through.” (P17)

“You have to nod, smile, and acknowledge, even when you know it won’t change anything. That’s just part of being professional.” (P08)

These accounts show how communicative routines make unlistening appear as part of professional role performance. Symbolic attentiveness becomes a workplace expectation that reinforces hierarchies and constrains dissent, signaling which forms of engagement are deemed credible while sidelining critique.

Synthesis of Themes

Taken together, these three themes show that unlistening is not incidental but sustained through coordinated organizational practices. Ritualized responsiveness illustrates how attentiveness is simulated, emotional shielding reveals how individuals protect themselves from the affective demands of such simulations, and managing appearances highlights the professional pressures that normalize symbolic listening. Collectively, these dynamics make unlistening appear legitimate and even necessary, sustaining organizational routines while constraining the transformative potential of dialog. As one participant summarized, “It looks like listening, but it is really just a way to keep things moving without change” (P06). Organizational rituals, role expectations, and institutional norms thus regulate who is heard, when, and how, making listening publicly visible while limiting genuine responsiveness.

Organizational Structures, Norms, and Power Relations Shaping Listening Practices

The second research question examined how organizational arrangements and power dynamics shape listening and unlistening in everyday work. Analysis revealed that unlistening is a patterned feature of institutional life, reproduced through hierarchical selectivity, procedural rituals, and role-based moral expectations. Three interconnected themes emerged: selective resonance, procedural containment, and asymmetric accountability.

Selective Resonance

Participants consistently reported that organizational hierarchies shape attentiveness, amplifying perspectives aligned with leadership priorities while deflecting or ignoring dissenting views:

“Leadership listens to those who already agree with them.” (P09)

“If your views challenge the status quo, you might as well not speak up.” (P02)

“There’s a lot of talk about listening at the top. . . it’s about predictability.” (P13)

These experiences illustrate how unlistening is structured by moral orders: employees quickly learn which voices will be heard and which will be deemed unintelligible within formal channels. Selective resonance signals to staff which opinions and emotional expressions are acceptable, reinforcing conformity and discouraging critique. For organizational communication, this shows that hierarchical attentiveness is not neutral: it actively shapes discourse, collaboration, and innovation.

Procedural Containment

Organizational listening was often embedded in formalized routines such as town hall meetings, internal surveys, and open-door invitations. Participants described these mechanisms as simulating openness while tightly constraining who speaks, when, and with what influence:

“The meetings are more about closure than conversation.” (P06)

“We give feedback repeatedly, but nothing changes. It’s like we’re stuck in a loop of appearances.” (P12)

These structured episodes, aligned with CMM’s concept of orchestrated communication events, absorb complexity while preserving consensus, yet fail to enable substantive change. Even when organizations promote participatory structures, they can function as symbolic rituals that stage engagement while reinforcing existing hierarchies. For managers and internal communicators, procedural containment highlights the risk that formalized listening practices can generate cynicism or disengagement if feedback loops remain unactionable.

Asymmetric Accountability

Participants described listening as unevenly distributed across hierarchical positions. Employees felt obligated to attend carefully to feedback, emotions, and directives from superiors, while perceiving that leadership was largely exempt from reciprocal attentiveness:

“We’re expected to listen upward and manage our reactions, but managers are insulated.” (P08)

“Listening is part of our job, not theirs.” (P15)

“You learn to filter what you say, to avoid pushing too hard or upsetting someone above you.” (P11)

This pattern reflects a moral order in which listening is performed as professional deference rather than shared responsibility. Employees adjust both their language and emotional engagement to navigate these expectations, showing how power, relational positioning, and institutional norms govern communicative participation.

Synthesis of Themes

Together, these three themes show how unlistening is sustained through coordinated organizational practices. Selective resonance directs attention toward favored voices, procedural containment structures opportunities to speak while limiting impact, and asymmetric accountability enforces hierarchical norms for who must listen and who may withhold attention: “The system itself decides which voices matter, not the people in the room.” (P14) These dynamics operate through discursive routines and institutionalized moral orders that privilege particular perspectives while marginalizing others. Listening thus emerges as both a performance and a mechanism of control, sustaining legitimacy while constraining genuine responsiveness across the organization.

Persistence of Unlistening Despite Organizational Rhetoric Valuing Listening

The third research question examined why patterns of unlistening persist even in organizations that publicly emphasize listening. Analysis revealed that unlistening is not a coordinated practice that stabilizes expectations and affirms managerial credibility.

Symbolic Legitimacy

Listening rhetoric reinforces leadership credibility without producing meaningful change. Participants described how listening appeared in mission statements, manager trainings, and internal branding campaigns, yet rarely shaped consequential decisions.

“Listening is part of the company language. . . but it rarely leads to anything real.” (P11)

“It’s like a checkbox exercise to show we care.” (P08)

These accounts highlight how listening rhetoric functions as organizational identity management, ensuring leaders appear responsive while maintaining authority. In communication terms, this shows how internal messaging may prioritize reputational control over genuine engagement. In this sense, listening becomes a symbolic resource that legitimizes leadership and organizational decisions, even when it does not alter them.

Strategic Risk Reduction

Participants described how leaders gravitated toward feedback that confirmed existing strategies because it reduced uncertainty, conflict, and emotional strain. Even in organizations that publicly champion listening, dissenting perspectives were often treated as destabilizing or inefficient:

“We tend to focus on feedback that supports our strategies; uncomfortable feedback is sidelined.” (P01)

“There’s a bubble, so leaders mostly hear what already fits their frame.” (P10)

This filtering seemed to persist because attending to it would have required reopening decisions, redistributing authority, or confronting tensions that threatened strategic coherence. By amplifying supportive input and minimizing critique, organizations maintained a sense of stability and control. Over time, this risk-averse pattern became routinized, making unlistening appear pragmatic and even necessary for protecting momentum, emotional manageability, and institutional identity.

Conflict-Avoidance Logic

Participants described modifying how they spoke, what they shared, or whether they participated at all, not only to protect themselves but to avoid triggering conflict, defensiveness, or managerial discomfort. Even in organizations that publicly emphasize listening, dissent was often perceived as creating friction or slowing down work:

“When you know only certain voices get heard, you learn to keep quiet or fit the narrative.” (P04)

“I’ve learned to say things in a way that won’t ruffle feathers..” (P16)

These adaptive strategies persist because they help maintain a sense of harmony, predictability, and emotional manageability for those in power. By smoothing over tension and preventing open disagreement, self-silencing supports organizational stability and protects leaders from confronting uncomfortable information. This conflict-avoidance logic makes unlistening appear pragmatic and even desirable, reinforcing its persistence despite rhetorical commitments to openness.

Synthesis of Themes

Taken together, these themes show that unlistening persists because symbolic, strategic, and relational incentives make unlistening functionally useful. Listening rhetoric provides symbolic legitimacy, allowing organizations to project openness while preserving authority: “Listening is part of the language, not the decisions.” (P11) Strategic risk-reduction practices protect stability by filtering out inputs that could disrupt decision-making, coherence, or managerial comfort. At the interpersonal level, conflict-avoidance logic encourages employees to self-silence to maintain harmony and prevent friction. Across these layers, unlistening becomes woven into everyday communication as a pragmatic, predictable, and institutionally rewarded pattern.

Discussion

Unlistening as an Organizational Procedure

Unlistening is a coordinated organizational procedure rather than a sporadic communicative failure. Across the nine themes identified in the results, listening was shown to be ritualized, emotionally managed, selectively amplified, and symbolically performed. This reframing extends Deetz’s (1992) notion of symbolic containment by demonstrating that listening itself can function as containment, not only silence. It also builds on scholarship on employee voice and organizational silence (Morrison & Milliken, 2000; Pinder & Harlos, 2001) by shifting attention from speaking to the organizational architectures that regulate how listening is enacted. Yip and Fisher (2022) argue that listening must be understood as systemic, and Kang and Moon (2024) show that employees often perceive listening initiatives as symbolic when they lack participatory follow-through. Taken together, these perspectives reinforce the conclusion that unlistening is a patterned organizational procedure that sustains legitimacy while limiting transformation. For business communication research, this reframing highlights how listening architectures themselves can enact containment, shifting analysis from employee expression to organizational design.

The Paradox of Listening Rhetoric

Listening rhetoric does not counteract unlistening but sustains it. Mission statements, branding campaigns, and participatory forums symbolically affirm responsiveness while routinizing selective resonance and procedural closure. This paradox, listening as both a promise and a mechanism of exclusion, extends Pearce’s (2007) description of “patterns that hold us hostage” by showing how organizational discourse stabilizes authority under the guise of openness. It also complicates research on organizational reputation and identity management (e.g., Cheney & Christensen, 2001), suggesting that listening initiatives may inadvertently reproduce the very dynamics they seek to disrupt. Recent studies reinforce this tension: Randall Brandt and Donohue (2024) show how leaders frame listening rhetorically as a strategic asset, while Yip and Fisher (2025) caution that leaders often overestimate their listening competence. Taken together, these perspectives highlight how listening rhetoric functions less as a pathway to responsiveness than as a form of symbolic branding. By reframing listening as a patterned organizational procedure of unlistening, this study resonates with existing critiques of organizational discourse and expands them by theorizing listening itself as a mechanism of control rather than dialog.

Symbolic Practices and Institutional Preservation

Organizational routines and communicative practices often serve legitimacy rather than transformation. Opportunities to be heard may exist, but they frequently operate as symbolic performances that stage engagement without integrating input. This finding extends Mumby’s (2012) critique of communicative practices that sustain organizational inertia, showing how listening itself can be ritualized into compliance. Employees respond by self-censoring or strategically adjusting their speech, reinforcing the cycle of unlistening. For business communication, these findings highlight a critical risk: symbolic listening can perpetuate dysfunction and disengagement even in environments that publicly value participation. The results of this study show how communicative structures can simultaneously invite and neutralize employee voice, echoing concerns raised in research on organizational participation (Ashcraft et al., 2009). Prior work has noted similar tensions: for example, Perceptyx’s (2025) report documents how listening programs often fail to close the feedback loop, and Puusa and Ala-Kortesmaa (2019) describe how interactional routines in expert organizations ritualize listening while reinforcing conformity. Taken together, this study extends these insights by demonstrating how symbolic listening serves as a mechanism for legitimacy maintenance in everyday organizational communication, allowing organizations to project openness while limiting the impact of employee input.

Structural Pressures and the Emotional Labor of Listening

The findings show that employee withdrawal from communication is not disengagement but a structural adaptation to organizational unlistening. When feedback loops are symbolic, dissent is filtered out, and accountability is uneven, employees regulate their own attentiveness to protect emotional energy, avoid interpersonal risk, and maintain professional credibility. Practices such as emotional shielding and conflict-avoidance logic emerge as pragmatic responses to communication environments that make listening costly.

This perspective extends work on emotional labor (Hochschild, 1983) and organizational moral orders (Carbaugh, 2007) by demonstrating how institutional routines shape not only what employees say but what they allow themselves to hear. Rather than treating silence or selective participation as individual deficits, the findings show how organizational structures compel employees to withdraw in order to navigate risk and maintain stability. Recent research similarly frames silence as a protective strategy in risk-laden environments (e.g., Kim & Wang, 2024). However, this study highlights how such withdrawal is produced by systemic patterns of unlistening rather than personal reluctance.

Recognizing withdrawal as a structural adaptation reframes the challenge for leaders and internal communicators. The issue is not a lack of interpersonal skill or willingness to engage, but communication systems that make listening emotionally and professionally hazardous. Designing channels that reduce risk, distribute attentiveness more equitably, and create conditions for safe participation is therefore essential for meaningful organizational listening. Together, these insights state that employee withdrawal is a predictable outcome of organizational structures that make listening costly, not a sign of individual disengagement.

Interplay of Structures and Agency

The findings show that unlistening is sustained through the interaction of organizational structures and employee agency. Hierarchical norms, accountability asymmetries, and ritualized responsiveness shape the conditions under which listening becomes possible. At the same time, employees navigate these constraints through practices such as emotional shielding, conflict-avoidance logic, and strategic compliance. These patterned adaptations reveal how unlistening is not simply imposed from above but co-produced through everyday communicative choices.

This dynamic aligns with perspectives that view communication as culturally patterned and structurally coordinated. For example, speech-code approaches (Philipsen, 1992) help explain how organizational cultures cultivate predictable ways of speaking and withholding, while coordination-focused theories such as CMM (Pearce, 2007) illuminate how routines stabilize participation over time. Work on communicative constitution (Schoeneborn et al., 2019) similarly discusses how organizational structures are reproduced through discourse, and research on organizational ignorance (Roberts, 2013) highlights how selective attention is actively maintained. Studies of silence (e.g., Parke et al., 2022; Westover, 2024) further suggest that strategic withholding can be rewarded, reinforcing the agency side of this interplay.

Taken together, these perspectives help clarify what the data revealed: unlistening persists because structures and agency reinforce one another. Organizational routines create conditions that make listening risky or inconsequential, and employees adapt in ways that stabilize those very routines. For business communication, this emphasizes the need to analyze systemic practices and individual strategies together, recognizing unlistening as a co-produced organizational accomplishment rather than a failure of either leaders or employees alone.

Practical Implications for Business Communication

Because the findings show that unlistening is produced through organizational structures rather than individual shortcomings, the practical implications focus on redesigning the systems that shape how listening occurs. These insights suggest several actionable steps for practitioners:

1. Audit listening structures: Map where feedback is collected and processed, identifying gaps between rhetoric and action.

2. Design inclusive dialog channels: Create forums where dissenting perspectives are legitimized and have a visible impact.

3. Recognize and support emotional labor: Provide resources and guidance to help employees manage the affective demands of attentive communication.

4. Shift from symbolic to substantive listening: Embed follow-up mechanisms, accountability, and visible responsiveness in feedback systems.

5. Align leadership discourse with practice: Ensure internal messaging and engagement initiatives reflect concrete action, not only rhetorical commitments.

Taken together, these practices help organizations replace symbolic listening with communication systems that make participation safer, more substantive, and more consequential.

Limitations and Future Directions

While this study offers in-depth insights, several limitations should be noted. First, the research draws on three Finnish expert organizations, which may limit transferability to other sectors or cultural contexts. Future work should examine unlistening in high-turnover, hierarchical, or cross-cultural organizations. Second, the study focused on interactional, discursive, and affective dimensions, leaving neurocognitive, personality, and behavioral mechanisms underexplored. Integrating perspectives from psychology or behavioral economics could enrich understanding. Third, the findings are based on self-reported narratives, which may be influenced by retrospective bias or social desirability. Ethnographic observation or communicative trace data could complement these insights.

Finally, future research could investigate interventions to disrupt ritualized unlistening, such as leadership coaching, dialog capacity-building, or digital feedback design, and examine their efficacy across hybrid work environments. Further work should also explore how unlistening interacts with emerging organizational forms, including platform work, algorithmic management, and AI-mediated communication.

Conclusion

Unlistening persists not despite, but through, the rhetoric of listening. It is a socially coordinated, emotionally managed, and structurally patterned practice that preserves organizational legitimacy, stabilizes institutional norms, and shapes how participation becomes possible. By naming its organizational architectures, tracing its emotional and interactional dynamics, and illustrating how employees adapt to its constraints, this study clarifies how unlistening is reproduced through everyday communication. In doing so, it reframes listening as an institutional practice rather than an interpersonal skill, offering business communication scholarship a structural framework for analyzing how organizations design, perform, and regulate responsiveness.