COLLABORATION
Why Some Work Groups Thrive While Others Falter
By IRVING WLADAWSKY-BERGER WSJ.com
"the best performing groups exhibited three key characteristics:..
Higher empathy. Members scored higher in social sensitivity. That is, the ability to read each other’s emotional states as measured by the Reading the Mind in the Eyes test originally developed at the Autism Research Center at the University of Cambridge...
..It found that the traditional hard skills typically provided by engineering and business schools must be complemented with a set of soft skills or attributes. Five were identified: adaptability, cultural competence, 360-degree thinking, intellectual curiosity and empathy.
Empathy turned out to be the most important of the five attributes.
“Frankly, when empathy kept coming up in our research, I was surprised,” Dr. Wilson wrote. “All of the people we interviewed were serious business executives. Empathy was not the first virtue I associated with the rough and tumble of today’s highly competitive business world. I expected to hear about boldness, perseverance, and toughness.”
"Better teamwork and greater job satisfaction have followed empathy training provided to adults (Herbek and Yammarino 1990)."