Emotions and Organizational Governance

Gerald F. Burch, Andrew A. Bennett, Ronald H. Humphrey, John H. Batchelor and Athena H. Cairo

Keywords: Empathy; affect; emotion; empathy in organizations; emotions in organizations; empathy review

Empathy is often described as feeling the same emotion of another person or “putting yourself in someone else’s shoes” (Lazarus, 1991, 1999). It is so socially important that Ickes (1997, p. 2) claimed empathy “may be the second greatest achievement of which the mind is capable,” since it facilitates communication and establishes relational bonds. In spite of this importance, organization research has suffered from lapses in empathy research and from a fractured research stream.

The main purpose of this chapter is to fill a literature gap by providing a review of empathy research in a management setting, thereby offering three contributions. First, we integrate the developing field of empathy research and provide a conceptual framework built on Ashkanasy’s (2003) five levels of analysis in emotions research. Second, we address the complaint that empathy definitions are not consistent (Bagozzi et al., 2013) by illustrating how the level of analysis alters the view of empathy’s role in organizations. And finally, we use the framework to identify gaps in the empathy literature and make recommendations for future research.

LEVEL 1: WITHIN-PERSON

Researchers who study within-person variability in emotions often base their research on Affective Events Theory (AET) (Weiss & Cropanzano, 1996). According to AET, people’s emotions and moods are influenced both by their average emotional baseline and by affective events that occur in the workplace. When considering empathy, potentially empathic events may trigger automatic empathic responses. Thus feelings of empathy vary throughout the day according to workplace triggers, natural biorhythms, people’s empathic baseline, and self-regulation abilities. However, the resulting observable behavior may be masked by organization members’ ability to self-regulate, and self-regulation may influence the within-person variability in empathy. We review the research from management literature on empathy for these automatic responses and self-regulation to understand the within-person aspect of empathy.

Automatic Empathic Response

Affective empathy refers to feeling the emotions of others and has been described as an “other-oriented emotional response elicited by the congruent welfare of someone else” (Batson, 2009, p. 418). This affective component is an automatic, or “bottom-up,” process that occurs within individuals, meaning it occurs before conscious awareness and is a form of imitation. Research on the Mirror Neuron System (MNS) has demonstrated that certain visuomotor neurons in the premotor cortex of monkeys discharge both when a monkey does a particular action and when observing another doing a similar action (Di Pellegrino, Fadiga, Fogassi, Gallese & Rizzolatti, 1992; Gallese, Fadiga, Fogassi, & Rizzolatti, 1996; Rizzolatti, Fadiga, Fogassi, & Gallese, 1996). In humans, there is some evidence of motor cortex activation in similar areas as mirror neuron regions in primates when viewing another person’s behavior (Kilner & Lemon, 2013). These automatic responses may arise when we attend to the emotional reactions of others, particularly those in pain or distress. Our physiological and affective state is often altered when we empathize with others (Vignemont & Singer, 2006) to include activation of brain structures that control the heart and regulate automatic states (Critchley, Wiens, Rothstein, Ohman, & Dolan, 2004). Research in this area supports early definitions of empathy as a form of imitation (Montag et al., 2008; Preston & Hofelich, 2012).

Cognitive Empathy

Cognitive empathy refers to knowing the emotions of others. This is when a person is aware of sharing the same emotion as someone else while also being aware that they are not experiencing that emotion due to the same cause (Decety & Meyer, 2008). The cognitive process is a more controlled or “top-down” process. Management researchers have studied empathy as an individual difference or trait, an ability that can change over time and with training, and as a short-term state that is based on situational contexts. Recent investigations have shown that it is more likely that an individual can learn or improve cognitive empathy but affective empathy remains more stable and is a trait-like process (Dziobek et al., 2008). Cognitive empathy can vary at the within person level because people’s focus of attention can shift through the day, making them more or less aware of others’ feelings. Throughout the day, people may also vary in how much attention they pay to their own feelings of empathy. Studies on perspective-taking have shown that people’s empathic concern can vary according to instructions that vary their focus of attention (Batson, Eklund, Chermok, Hoyt, & Ortiz, 2007).

Behavioral Empathy

Behavioral empathy is an observable action deriving from the cognitive and affective components. Most frequently, this is considered prosocial or citizenship behavior, and most researchers explain prosocial behavior motivation using the empathy-altruism hypothesis (Batson et al., 1995). Some studies have shown that empathic behaviors come at a cost, meaning that an individual might sacrifice something of value to them (e.g., money, time) when behaving in this manner (Joireman, Daniels, George-Falvy, & Kamdar, 2006). An evolutionary perspective on this altruistic response is that humans engage in these behaviors to help the species because during these interactions, all humans are considered part of the in-group (Preston, 2013). Although some people may normally be high on empathy, the propensity to engage in empathic behaviors is likely to vary widely during the day due to environmental circumstances, fluctuations in moods, etc.

Self-Regulation

The final discussion point at this level is the degree of self-regulation that occurs within the person. We have placed the empathic response in the center of our model, in level 3, based on the interpersonal effects caused by the empathic response. However, empathic responses can begin at the within-person level, as individuals must regulate the extent to which they experience, repress, and display empathy. As discussed in the next section, a variety of personality traits and individual differences may influence the ability of people to regulate their within person variation in emotions. For example, emotional intelligence, an individual difference level 2 variable, influences the ability of people to regulate their within person emotional variability. Some models of emotional intelligence include empathy as one of the subscales that measure emotional intelligence. For example, the Emotional Competency Inventory (ECI) (Boyatzis & Goleman, 2002) includes empathy as an important subscale.

Proposition 2. At the within-person level of analysis, empathic events may trigger automatic empathic responses within the person, while self-regulation may limit the level of empathic displays.

LEVEL 2: BETWEEN PERSONS

Organizational research has shown that an individual’s empathic ability affects many management constructs. Fox and Spector (2000) found that empathy was an important predictor of job interview performance. Similarly, those scoring higher on self-reported empathy saw higher sales performance (Dawson & Pettijohn, 1992; Tobolski & Kerr, 1952), have increased perceptions of interpersonal and interactional justice when delivering bad news (Patient & Skarlicki, 2008), and show increased moral judgment (Lardén, Melin, Holst, & Långström, 2006) over those with lower self-reported empathy. We propose that these individual differences exist based on the individual’s traits, dispositional tendencies, and their considered behavior.

Individual Differences

Antecedents to individual differences in empathy include age, gender, and self-regulation. Affective empathy is shown to increase as individuals get older (Sze, Gyurak, Goodkind, & Levenson, 2012). This may be in part due to older adults having more formative experiences that allow them to associate with others’ feelings (Hall, Andrzejewski, & Yopchick, 2009). It may be difficult for a young man to empathize with an older man because they have never been in that situation (Katz, 1963). The opposite is most likely not true for the older man’s empathy for the younger man’s situation.

A second individual difference observed by researchers is gender. Pfeifer and Dapretto (2009) suggested that females, on average, might exhibit stronger MNS involvement based on their role in caretaking of the young. This is supported by the research that suggests that females, on average, are more empathic and less analytic than males (Baron-Cohen, 2002).

An individual’s emotional and cognitive regulatory ability is also shown to affect empathic responding (Tangney, Baumeister, & Boone, 2004; Taylor, Eisenberg, Spinrad, Eggum, & Sulik, 2013). These regulatory abilities are therefore part of considered behavior that results from an empathic event. Greater emotional regulatory ability can promote an empathic response compared to a personal distress response in the face of another’s distress (Eisenberg, 2010). However, if people are motivated to avoid feeling empathy (perhaps when they think their empathy will be costly or unhelpful), greater regulatory ability can also predict a suppression of affective empathy (Cameron & Payne, 2011).

Dispositional Tendencies

Davis (1980, 1983) identified four dispositional tendencies linked to empathy: empathic concern, personal distress, perspective-taking, and fantasizing. These tendencies refer to the individual’s preferred method of empathizing, and once again demonstrate the affective and cognitive nature of the construct. Empathic concern and personal distress align more closely with affective empathy where the individual is emotionally altered by the event. Similarly, perspective-taking and fantasizing are cognitive events where the individual consciously considers what it is like to be the other person. Research has shown that individual differences further affect dispositional tendencies.

Although social roles in Western nations tend to conceptualize women as more affectively empathic and socially sensitive (Wood & Eagly, 2002), empirical evidence of gender dissociations in empathic dispositional tendencies are mixed. Women often self-report higher trait and state empathic concern or distress compared to men; however, these differences in empathy may be due to social norms of emotional expression and engagement, or interpretation of prior experiences (Batson et al., 1996). More recently, neuroimaging techniques have shown that women do recruit more cortical mirror neuron areas when engaging in both self and other-focused perspective-taking, which suggests that regardless of whether or not these differences are socialized, they do seem to be reflected by divergent neural architecture (Schulte-Rüther, Markowitsch, Shah, Fink, & Piefke, 2008). In essence, women’s empathic responding seems to be more “bottom-up,” starting with the affective neural process then moving to a cognitive process, whereas men’s empathy is often more “top-down,” recruiting pathways of cognitive understanding to motivate a neural affective response (Derntl et al., 2010).

Proposition 3. Age, gender, emotional regulatory ability, and cognitive regulatory ability affect the individual’s experience and displays of empathy.

Proposition 4. The individual’s preferred method of empathizing will affect the level of affective empathic processing (empathic concern and personal distress) and cognitive empathic processing (perspective-taking and fantasizing).

LEVEL 3: INTERPERSONAL

The previous two levels of analysis addressed the empathic responses that were automatic (level 1) and discussed how they were influenced by individual differences (level 2). These levels are important to management researchers because they explain the empathic processes occurring within the person and how these processes are different between persons. However, a significant change in research occurs in level 3 where the empathic behavior is finally exhibited in a social setting, thereby potentially affecting others in the organization. At this level, the situation affects empathic behavior, and this behavior subsequently alters interpersonal relationships.

Situation

While individual differences and dispositional tendencies of empathy are relatively stable over time, their effects on empathic behavior are moderated by situational factors. One situational factor which has received considerable attention is the degree of similarity, or representational self-other overlap, between the empathizer and other person (Decety & Jackson, 2004; Preston & Hofelich, 2012). Chambers and Davis (2012) suggest that similarity acts as a cognitive heuristic for empathic motivation, meaning the greater the ease in which someone can imagine themselves in another’s place, the more likely they are to feel empathic concern or compassion for them if there are no constraints on ability or motivation. A second situational consideration is experience. Batson et al. (1996) demonstrated that people who had recently undergone an experience of anxious anticipation showed higher physiological empathic arousal toward another person in the same situation. However, those who have gone through similar emotional experiences may also underestimate the intensity to which another person feels that emotion (Campbell, O’Brien, Van Boven, Schwartz, & Ubel, 2014). Thus, experience may more positively impact emotional empathy than cognitive.

The previous two situational variables allude to a potential mental model where it is more acceptable to empathize with those that are seen as being similar, or where one has experience with the situation. In essence, individuals may empathize with those in the in-group and not empathize with the out-group (see Tajfel, 1982). The perception-action mechanism (PAM) theory of empathy asserts that witnessing emotional states in others activates neural regions related to feeling that emotion as well as those of perceiving it visually or audibly. This neural overlap may activate shared mental representations of oneself and the other, which facilitates affective resonance and accurate perspective-taking (Preston & de Waal, 2002; Preston & Hofelich, 2012). Some evidence for neural self-other overlap comes from functional imaging studies showing that seeing another’s pain activated neural regions associated with feeling pain in one’s own body. Individuals high in dispositional affective empathy showed greater activation of these regions during these situations (Morelli, Rameson, & Lieberman, 2014). In contrast, this effect is attenuated when the observed person is of a different social group, such as race (Azevedo et al., 2013). This effect may be in part due to two other situational factors: noticing the person’s need and valuing their welfare (Batson, 1991; Batson et al., 2007).

Research indicates that while it may be possible that altruistic motivation is often automatic (Zaki & Mitchell, 2013), one must notice a need for help in order for that motivation to be elicited as well as take personal responsibility to help (Darley & Latane, 1968; Dickert & Slovic, 2009). Valuing another person’s welfare provides the motivation to be vigilant to the other person’s nonverbal and situational cues and intuitively adopt his or her perspective (Batson et al., 2007). In line with this reasoning, halo factors such as perceived attractiveness also promote empathic behavior, ostensibly through motivating greater attention to and valuation of the person’s welfare (Müller, Van Leeuwen, Van Baaren, Bekkering, & Dijksterhuis, 2013).

Empathic Behavior

Empathic behaviors exist at the center of our model and represent the transition between individual cognitive and affective processes which results in observable actions. Empathic behaviors motivate responses to another’s emotional state and well-being, thereby demonstrating acceptance, cooperation, or willingness to help. The empathy-altruism hypothesis proposes that empathy focuses one’s goal upon the welfare of another person or group rather than on their own interests (Batson, 1991; Batson et al., 1995). Empathic motivation is resilient to personal costs, and individuals are often willing to sacrifice something of value to them (e.g., money, time) when behaving in this manner (Joireman, Daniels, et al., 2006).

Dozens of studies have found evidence that empathic concern acts as an altruistic, rather than egoistic, motivator for helping others in costly helping situations (Batson, 1991). Empathizing with others also results in the sharing of similar emotions. This type of communication may allow individuals to accept one another and develop a relationship of appreciation (Tiedens, 2000). Consequently, when we are experiencing an emotion, if others do not share our emotions and empathize with us, “we experience ourselves more as objects and less as persons” (Katz, 1963, p. 496). Empathy is therefore an important social construct that can create bonds between individuals or build barriers when empathic behavior is not presented at the appropriate times.

Proposition 5. Individual empathic displays become important social events at the interpersonal level since they become observable actions. These empathic displays are moderated by the situation and stand to strengthen interpersonal relationships.

Proposition 6. The degree of similarity, individual experience, and placement within the in-group or out-group will moderate the empathic behavior by the individual.

Proposition 7. Empathic displays strengthen interpersonal relationships. The absence of expected empathic displays constructs barriers to interpersonal relationships.

LEVEL 4: GROUPS AND TEAMS

Much of the emerging research in empathy focuses on leadership, perhaps due to the importance of establishing good leader-member relationships at the dyadic and team levels. However, empathy research in level 4 is grounded in the social context which is affected by leadership and the social goals set by groups and teams. We begin this discussion by reviewing the research that has been conducted on leadership effects.

Empathic behaviors can impact leader emergence and leader performance. For example, Kellett et al. (2002) found that empathy was one of two routes to leadership emergence in groups, and that some people emerge as leaders by displaying empathy while others emerged as leaders through complex task performance and through their intellectual abilities. In a follow-up study, these authors developed a measure of interactive empathy that is especially appropriate for leaders. They found that group members high on interactive empathy were more likely to emerge as leaders and that interactive empathy predicted both relations and task leadership (Kellett, Humphrey, & Sleeth, 2006). They also found that interactive empathy mediated the effect of other emotional abilities (i.e., the ability to identify others’ emotions and the ability to express one’s own emotions) on both types of leadership. Moreover, interactive empathy was a more important predictor of leadership emergence than cognitive intelligence and complex task performance. A later study also found that empathy is related to both task and relations leadership, and that these types of leadership behaviors in turn predicted the quality of leader-member relations (Mahsud, Yukl, & Prussia, 2010). Likewise, Wolff et al. (2002) found that, in self-managed teams, moment-to-moment empathic behaviors predicted team leader emergence. Empathy is also positively related to perceived transformational leadership, negatively related to laissez-faire leadership, and has no significant relationship with transactional leadership (Skinner & Spurgeon, 2005). Perhaps most convincing to businesses, Sadri et al. (2011) found that leaders in 38 different countries who were perceived by their subordinates to be high on empathy received higher performance ratings than those low on empathy.

The effects of empathy at the group and team level are also influenced by the social goals of the group and team. Although organizational leaders often set the emotional tone for an organization, there are also cases where emotions and empathic concern emanate from the bottom-up. Muller, Pfarrer, and Little (2014, p. 1) argued that “collective empathy” occurs when organization members collectively respond to the needs of others, “thereby affecting the likelihood, scale, and form of corporate philanthropy.” According to their theory, top executives tend to use a more rational and cognitive approach when making philanthropic decisions, but they can be influenced by the more affective empathic responses of their employees. Therefore, the social goals, or the social motives to engage or not engage with others’ emotions create rules for pushing individuals toward empathic behaviors (approach motives) or to pull them away (avoidance motives) from empathic actions (Zaki, 2014).

Together, social goals and leadership affect the overall social context where empathy is encouraged or discouraged at the group or team level. It is this social context that provides the background for considered empathic behaviors. The leader, group, or team gets to determine the value of empathic behaviors, thereby adopting an approach motive pushing individuals toward empathic displays or avoidance motives. Subsequently, social interactions with those that display empathy may result in more considered empathic behaviors by the entire group. In a sense, empathic behaviors may have an emotional contagion effect, since emotional contagion appears to be driven more from affective empathy than cognitive empathy (Nummenmaa, Hirvonen, Parkkola, & Hietanen, 2008). This subsequent increase in empathic display can result in increased group affect as evidenced by an increase in employees’ willingness to engage in OCBs. OCBs are “contributions to the maintenance and enhancement of the social and psychological context that supports task performance” (Organ, 1997, p. 91). These are behaviors that are not specifically required by one’s job but are performed for the overall good of one’s organization without recognition. Joireman, Kamdar, et al. (2006) empirically showed that individuals higher in empathy are more likely to engage in OCBs than those lower in empathy. Leaders who are keenly aware of others’ emotions and who re-experience their emotions in an empathic manner are likely to take action to alleviate employee problems. Managers with higher levels of self-reported empathy have employees that self-report fewer somatic complaints, higher levels of positive affect, and increased goal performance (Scott et al., 2010).

Proposition 8. Social goals and leadership affect the overall social context whereby empathy is either encouraged or discouraged at the group or team level.

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CHAPTER 7

UNRAVELING THE COMPLEXITIES OF EMPATHY RESEARCH: A MULTI-LEVEL MODEL OF EMPATHY IN ORGANIZATIONS

ABSTRACT

MULTI-LEVEL MODEL OF EMPATHY IN ORGANIZATIONS