Empathy at work can boost performance

Research shows that being able to feel positively about colleagues' success can lead to increased employee learning, helping, and cooperation—behaviours that ultimately improve business performance.

We've all experienced the sting of being passed over for a promotion at work. 

Or the gut wrench as your boss piles on lavish praise to your outspoken colleague while neglecting to mention your efforts.

But what if there was a way to harness this energy into a positive response to your coworker's success? 

“For a long time, management scholars focused purely on envy as the sole emotional response of an employee to their coworkers' positive outcomes,” Associate Professor of Management Deshani Ganegoda says.

“Our work shows that there is a converse reaction to envy—an employee’s happiness for a colleague’s success—a phenomenon we called ‘Positive Empathy.”

The data shows that positive empathy at work leads to increased interpersonal learning, helping, and cooperation among employees.

Why is envy so prevalent in the workplace?

Associate Professor Ganegoda says workplaces have traditionally been breeding grounds for envy because employees are competing for scarce resources, which naturally creates a competitive context.

Anyone with a LinkedIn account can probably attest to the fact that we are more likely to share our positive news with others.

“We tend to have strong emotions about other people’s outcomes. Although those emotions can be both positive and negative, our focus so far has almost exclusively been on envy,” Associate Professor Ganegoda says. “Envy is a painful emotion. The human brains processes envy the same way it processes physical pain.”

But people don’t feel workplace envy for just anyone. They feel envy if they compare unfavourably with someone similar in a domain that is important to them.

Someone who is too dissimilar to them or working in a domain that is not relevant to them, are less likely to invoke the emotion.

And when people experience the green-eyed monster, it is likely they will undermine the envied other by withholding help and useful information, which will ultimately affect the overall performance of the team. 

"Envy is a painful emotion. The human brains processes envy the same way it processes physical pain."

Does everyone experience workplace envy the same?

There are some people who use envy to improve themselves rather than undermine others. These kinds of people tend to have high self-esteem and a high sense of control over their environment knowing they can change their circumstances. They also tend to be more stable emotionally and less neurotic.

“It’s not that they don’t feel envy, it’s that they use it to better themselves and pull themselves up rather than pull other people down” Associate Professor Ganegoda says.

If you fall into this category, you’re more likely to seek advice from the colleague who’s been promoted and be open to learning through observation so you can achieve the same kind of success in the future.

Why should we cultivate positive empathy?

While some organisations use envy to motivate people, Associate Professor Ganegoda cautions leaders against cultivating a culture that pits people against each other.

“The outcomes are usually negative and don’t lead to learning or cooperation between people,” Associate Professor Ganegoda says.

It is problematic when high performers get victimised by their colleagues because of envy. And Associate Professor Ganegoda says envy can lead to unethical behaviour including lying on a resume to appear more qualified to get an advancement.

Finally, workplace envy has been shown to produce negative health and wellbeing outcomes for both the person feeling the envy and the colleague on the receiving end.

Positive empathy on the other hand, has personal and interpersonal benefits. 

She says cultivating a culture of positive empathy is better for business with employees more likely to help others, learn from each other, and engage in greater levels of cooperation. 

But competition is inherent in workplaces where people are competing for scarce resources and opportunities, so how can we reduce the extent to which competition leads to workplace envy? There are two key ingredients that lead to healthy competition that is devoid of envy and the first is fairness.

“If we know the success went to someone who really deserved it, we are unlikely to be envious. We might feel disappointed that we didn’t get the same success, but we are unlikely to hold ill-will towards the successful other,” Associate Professor Ganegoda says.

The second aspect is control, “knowing that while it might not be your turn now, you can improve your performance in the future and that is within your control is also likely to reduce envy.”

Who is most likely to experience ‘positive empathy’?

Associate Professor Ganegoda found some people were more likely to experience positive empathy than others when it came to their colleagues’ success at work.

Those who are prone to experiencing positive empathy are those who are good at perspective-taking, which is a cognitive process that enables us to understand and share the emotional state of others. 

Triggers of perspective-taking that facilitate positive empathy include:

Interpersonal liking

Associate professor Ganegoda says unsurprisingly, we tend to pay more attention to people we like more than those we don’t, so we’re more likely to take their perspectives and feel positive empathy for those we have high regard for.

Shared group identity

If a successful colleague is in the same ‘in group’ as we are, we are more likely to experience positive empathy for that person. For example, if we’re all engineers or all accountants, we’ll feel a sense of ‘us versus them’.

Task Interdependence

If we’re required to interact with a colleague day-to-day to achieve our tasks, this interdependence leads to an increased likelihood of perspective taking and experiencing of positive empathy.

Dispositional positive empathy

Lastly, Associate Professor Ganegoda says some people have a natural disposition to experience positive empathy where it’s an innate quality and part of their personality.

What can leaders do to facilitate positive empathy?

While there is still much research to be done into how leaders can intervene to foster greater positive empathy, Associate Professor Ganegoda said there were a couple of obvious steps.

The first relates to mindfulness and observing your emotional reaction in the moment if you’re the one who is feeling envious of your colleagues.

“We all have immediate reactions, but we can step back and engage in perspective taking more consciously” she says.

Leaders can exercise practices which encourage actively sharing good news, not in an inauthentic way but in a way that encourages colleagues to be happy for one another and setting shared KPI’s.

“This could be designing a reward and recognition program where we don’t pit people against each other and of course, creating a culture at work that isn’t overly competitive and allows for people to celebrate each other’s successes.”

Deshani Ganegoda is an Associate Professor of Management at Melbourne Business School. Deshani teaches Managing People and Negotiation on the Full-time and Part-time MBA programs at MBS. She also teaches a variety of Executive Education programs, including Online New Leadership Program and the Advanced Management Program. 

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