Valuing
Make empathy an explicit cultural value and norm
Social categorization and empathy for outgroup members.
Tarrant M1, Dazeley S, Cottom T.
:Three experiments (N=370) investigated the effects of social categorization on the experience of empathy.
In Experiment 1, university students reported their empathy for, and intentions to help, a student who described a distressful experience. As predicted, participants reported stronger empathy and helping intentions when the student belonged to an ingroup compared to an outgroup university.
Experiments 2 and 3 demonstrated that stronger empathy for outgroup members was experienced following the activation of an ingroup norm that prescribed the experience of this emotion. Activating this norm also led to the expression of more positive attitudes towards the outgroup (Experiment 3), and empathy fully mediated this effect
These findings indicate that like other emotions, empathy is influenced by social categorization processes."
"Talk about empathy. Let managers know that empathy matters. Though task-oriented skills like monitoring, planning, controlling and commanding performance or “making the numbers” are important, understanding, caring, and developing others is just as important, if not more important, particularly in today’s workforce. Explain that giving time and attention to others fosters empathy, which in turn, enhances your performance and improves your perceived effectiveness. Specific measures of empathy can be used (such as the Benchmarks assessment used in this research) to give feedback about individual and organizational capacity for empathy."