Employees’ views on empathic behavior in the workplace: a bottom-up approach to understanding empathy

Abstract Although the empathy concept is relevant across all domains of human relations, it is often used in a vague and poorly defined way that limits its utility both in science and in real-world applications. Research indeed suggests that behaviors considered “empathic” vary across individuals and according to context. This research looked at the organizational context, by (a) in two studies, asking employees in many different work settings to rate a diverse list of workplace behaviors for how much each is empathic to them, and (b) in a third study, analyzing employees’ messages describing instances of fellow employees’ empathic behavior posted to their companies’ rewards platform. In Study 1 ( N = 318), employees in different companies responded to a list of 44 discrete behaviors, and in Study 2 ( N = 234), employees responded to the same behaviors as well as 25 more. In both studies, two conceptually different, but empirically related, types of empathy emerged, which we labeled Emotional Sensitivity and Professionalism. In Study 3, we coded for these two dimensions in 1,497 messages sent by employees on a company rewards platform where they described “empathic” workplace behaviors by co-workers. Results of all three studies suggest that in the workplace, behavioral manifestations of “empathy” extend beyond conventional notions of personal responsiveness to include task functions, thus demonstrating that “empathy” in the real world covers surprisingly wide territory. The research shows that context matters in discussions of empathy and provides a concrete vocabulary for scholars and organizations to use in research on workplace culture.