Long-Term Organizational Growth Following Disasters: The Role of Collective Empathy

This study examines how organizations exposed to disasters transform collective adversity into sustained growth. Drawing on organizational learning and collective emotion theories, we argue that disasters, while often disruptive in the short term, can also foster the emergence of collective empathy—an organizational-level sensitivity to others’ needs that motivates coordinated actions to support societal well-being—which, as organizations recover, contributes to long-term growth. Using difference-in-differences analyses on an 11-year panel of 575 Japanese companies affected by the 2011 Great East Japan Earthquake, combined with unique survey data, we find that organizations with moderate disaster exposure achieved, on average, higher long-term growth than those with low or high exposure. Further analyses suggest that this pattern is mediated by heightened collective empathy. The study identifies collective empathy as a key pathway to post-disaster organizational learning, underscoring the critical yet underexplored role of collective emotions in shaping organizational growth trajectories after disasters.