Journal of Management, Spirituality & Religion, 2014
BOOK REVIEW
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Organizing through empathy, edited by Kathryn Pavlovich and Keiko Krahnke, London, Routledge, 2014, 233 pp., US$125.00 (hardback), ISBN 0-41-584411-8 “Forget ethics training: Focus on empathy” shouts a headline in The Financial Post (21 June 2013). The query “why empathy is important” yields 35,000 hits in Google, and empathy is definitely a star in the self-help literature. Are we looking at a new fashion, a new soft trend in management and the business world? Not a trend, imply co-editors Kathryn Pavlovich (current chair of the MSR Division at the AOM) and Keiko Krahnke (the former chair of MSR). Challenging the 120-year-old capitalist management principles of profit and efficiency, they claim that “Empathy is the most important organizing mechanism … helps in the reduction of human suffering and the creation of a more just society”. The idea that empathy is a “good thing” is a no-brainer to most of us: it promotes understanding, sharing, collaboration, and heroic acts, enhances prosocial, ethical, and moral behaviors, reduces racism and aggression, and is even good for our physical and spiritual health. As well as its healing and transformational properties, empathy is beneficial in work organizations since it promotes knowledge-sharing, eases decision-making, and allows for productive teamwork as well as good sales and service to customers (Mattila and Hanks 2012, Krok 2013, Roberge, 2013, Dietz and Kleinlogel 2014). But the book’s mission is more ambitious: the editors argue that empathy “forms a shared experience and is the glue of social cohesion that organizes a coherent society” (p. 4). Therefore, “heightened levels of empathy are important for finding new ways of being …. A movement from I to WE and how we form our coexistence based upon our awareness of interdependence: ecocentric rather than egocentric” (p. 5). And in the concluding lines of the final paper in the book, Krahnke and Senge crown transcendent empathy as the key to the new emergent global civilization: “cultivating transcendent empathy could make all the difference in finding the wisdom to shape a future of well-being for the whole” (p. 200). But does the book fulfill that promise? Let’s start with what is empathy, according to the book, and what it is not. From all the definitions in the book, we can conclude the following three components of empathy: (1) An affective response to another person, which some believe entails sharing that person’s emotional state, or caring. Others see it as an
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innate capacity for attunement that adorns personal growth by forming deep connections with others. This may lead to empathic concern but also to personal distress (ch. 4). (2) Cognitive empathy – the capacity to assume the perspective of the other person, the awareness and understanding of the other’s thoughts and feelings, the ability to accept the other’s point of view without losing the self. (3) Some monitoring mechanisms that keep track of the origins (self vs. other) of the expected feelings. Awareness of the one who is aware – the fact that the watcher is part of the scene, what Berry and Joannidès (ch. 2) call “intrapersonal attunement”, Atkins (ch. 4) terms as “selfother differentiation”, and what Pate and Shoblom (ch. 8) define as just self-awareness. Most of the book’s authors adopt a integration of the three components, so that the cognitive and affective components of empathy comprise an interdependent system in which each influences the other, and which never can be fully understood while concentrating on one aspect to the relative exclusion of the others, and where the awareness, higher consciousness, and even transcendence of the empathic person, play important roles. What is not empathy? The book also supplies some answers to that: Empathy is not sympathy: the latter is an emotional state, sensing another’s pain. It can result in short-term action as the affective feeling recedes, as well as excessive emotional involvement liable to deplete the empathizer’s own self-care, while empathy is the capacity to grasp and understand the conditions of others (p. 3), and care for the other. Empathy is not an emotional contagion, or the “primitive”, instinctive, quick, involuntary, seemingly emotional reaction to the experiences of others, by catching the other’s mood (ch. 8). Empathy is not compassion. Whereas empathy is a passive acknowledgment and observation of the other, compassion is a call for action in a manner intended to ease suffering. It is remarkable that recently conducted brain research has shown that the two are indeed different (Klimecki et al. 2013) and I’ll refer to that later in my review. What is the opposite of empathy? Low empathy is usually considered the negative side of empathy, but Munro, Powis and Bore (ch. 9) cite Paulhus and Williams (2002) who consider empathy as bipolar, in which the “Dark Triad” of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathy provide the negative pole. I’ll also address that here. So what do we have in the book? The first part takes the individual level, spiritual–contemplative approach. Heaton and Travis (ch. 1) promote the case for TM (Transcendental Meditation) as a tool for developing higher consciousness which equals growth of empathy, including the rather controversial collective consciousness proposition (p. 17). Berry and Joannidès (ch. 2) explore the conditions needed for empathy
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to emerge: that is, interpersonal and intrapersonal attunement, relational safety, and shared narratives, all of which are found in religion and spirituality, through meditation, prayer, trust in God, and shared narratives like sacred books. Atkins (ch. 3) proposes a distinction between self and other as content (stable qualities), as a process (the here and now, the more flexible, dynamic, and context-sensitive self), and the self and other as a context, the transcendental experiencing sense of oneness between self and other: he promotes mindfulness and meditation as the key to empathy. The interesting innovation in this part of the book is the movement from the classic realm of “psychological” empathy as skills for interpersonal communication, based on active listening, reflecting, mirroring, reframing, and win–win dialog techniques, all interactional in their nature, towards contemplative spiritual techniques that have to do both with emptying the self from fixed and closed ideas of self, others, and the issue at hand, and eliminating the barriers between self and others. Some more comparative information about the strengths and weaknesses of each contemplative technique would have been helpful, but considering the mixed results of the research in the field, and the fact that they represent different belief systems, may be good justification for simply presenting the different approaches without comparing them. The second part of the book engages with leadership, decision-making, and context. Using stories to make her point, Kisfalvi (ch. 5) follows leaders back to their past, to examine how personal histories effect empathic and nonempathic leadership, and by that provides a temporal grounding for the hereand-now emotional reactions. Rigidity and defensive reactions prevent empathy learning and change, and Kisfalvi offers a few approaches to promoting it. Natale, Libertella and Doran (ch. 6) seek to bring back to leadership the soft, emotional element of empathy, which was excluded from the leadership literature in favor of the cognitive one. Using as examples leaders such as Alan Lafley, the CEO of P&G, Meg Whitman, the former CEO of eBay, and others, they demonstrate that profit and empathy are not mutually exclusive. That, of course, brings up the issue of manipulation by empathy: doing good business by listening very carefully to the customer and employees is no doubt a good strategy for doing good business, but is it empathy? It seems that from the spiritual point of view, using listening “with the third ear” to promote self-interest is not necessarily an altruistic empathic behavior. The second set of applied chapters looks at decision-making. Kleinlogel and Dietz (ch. 7) do indeed look not only at the bright side of empathy, but also at its dark consequences: personal distress, favoritism, malicious empathy, and manipulations, which may lead to poor decision-making processes and outcomes. Pate and Shoblom (ch. 8) use the proven ACES reframing decisionmaking technique (Assumptions, Criteria, Evoked set and Strategy) to influence people to shift their perspective towards one that promotes empathy. The last set of chapters examines empathy in the context of medical school (ch. 9) and in the sport environment for young people (ch. 10). Both chapters
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describe the specific environment and each one’s need for empathy, both as a professional tool and an educational one. The book’s final chapter, “Transcendent empathy: the ability to see the larger system”, (Senge and Krahnke, ch. 12), though not new in its content, is definitely the most inspirational chapter in the book. Starting from their view that we are prone to analyze parts in isolation, instead of wholes and interactions, Senge and Krahnke describe the organization as a self-creating web of intentions and actions. From this point of view, they define empathy as the ability to transcend the ego, and to see and sense larger systems (p. 190). It means, among other things, a move away from caring about “us”, our kin and neighbors, to people or groups of people whom we do not know and are distant from us, toward people who are different from us, to all humanity and species, to nature and the larger biosphere. They also understand empathy as the recognition that we re-create the world, since we are trapped in the systems we have created, and as the ability to see connections across time, so we can be aware that it is us who make the world in which our children and grandchildren will live. In their concluding paragraph, they tie the mindfulness and contemplative approaches of the first part to this understanding of empathy. Emptying the mind and going to the “field” where all possibilities reside – the source of authentic presence and creativity – may lead us to “finding the wisdom to shape a future of well-being for the whole” (p. 200). Personally, I loved the book and identified with the journey it proposes, from the “I” to the “we”, from the psychological to the spiritual. The choice of topics and writers felt right, though not all of them are of the same quality. However, I missed a few things. Just from this point of view of the last chapter, with its vision of shaping the future, I wonder at the choice of the editors and some of the writers to exclude the behavioral, active component of empathy – compassion. Even if we can contest Rosenberg and Hovland’s (1960) classic distinction of three components of attitudes – affective, cognitive, and behavioral – and see the cognitive and behavioral components as derivative of affect, or affect and behavior as derivative of underlying beliefs (Fazio and Olson 2003), it seems to me that “shaping the future” needs some action. Some writers did mention empathic behaviors. Decision-making as regards wage cuts or ethical dilemmas, (as in ch. 7), entails action. In the chapter on medical students, Munro, Powis and Bore ask: “what exactly does a doctor have to do to be empathic”? (p. 159) and note that most answers tell you what not to do. Gano-Overway (p. 168) cites the idea of the African ethic of ubuntu (“I am because we are”, or “A person is a person through other persons”), where one achieves humanness and sense of self through positive interactions with others. Natale, Libertella and Doran exemplify empathy in organizational leadership as the actions taken by the leaders – be it Lafley’s “consumer closeness program” in P&G (p. 96) or eBay’s CEO Meg Whitman’s “emphatic engagement” in China (p. 98). In order to help others, make a better society, change the future of the world, and generate Tikkun Olam (healing the universe, in the Jewish
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tradition), the affective and cognitive components are not enough. Action towards others, and the world as a whole, is needed. Actions can stretch all the way from deliberate non-action (just be with the other, mentally or physically) to practically saving the other by direct action. Like in the Buddhist Mahayana tradition, the everyday Bodhisattva Vows present compassion as the first commandment: “However innumerable sentient beings are, I vow to save them”. In light of this view, I missed some insights about what the relations are between empathy and behavior and action. How do we promote compassionate action that is humble (Schein 2009), mindful, and yet effective? Must empathy precede helping behavior, or can it emerge as the result of one? Can you engage in compassionate behavior without affective and cognitive empathy? How can you train your mind to be compassionate, as is seen in the results of the brain research of Tibetan Buddhist monks? The book starts with a quote from President Obama: “So much of what is wrong with our politics has to do with the absence of that quality of empathy” (p. 1). There is very little discussion in the book about the negative pole of empathy and its consequences. Baron-Cohen (2011), in his book Zero Degrees of Empathy: A New Theory of Human Cruelty, contends that evil and cruelty are the consequences of lack of empathy. Cruel people fail to empathize with others. They do not recognize them as having feelings, sensations, or even minds similar to their own. Erosion of empathy allows them to treat others as “objects”. We are all located somewhere on the empathy spectrum: more like a dimmer dial, than an on–off switch, and a combination of genetic, neural, hormonal, and environmental factors lurk behind our position. If that is so, can empathy be learned? Can the erosion be reversed? In the Buddhist tradition, there are four “Brahma Vihara”, or four interrelated noble ways to abide with and live in relations to the others and to the world. The four are compassion: feeling the suffering of the other; sympathetic joy – seeing the happiness of others; equanimity – the ability to be simultaneously detached and understanding; and loving-kindness – the impersonal love for all sentient beings. Although it was implied throughout the book, what I missed most in it was the explicit reference to love – this higher form of mindful being in the world. But maybe it was present in the shortest chapter of all, a poem by Joanna Beth Tweedy (ch. 4). References Baron-Cohen, S., 2011. Zero degrees of empathy: a new theory of human cruelty. London: Penguin. Dietz, J. and Kleinlogel, E., 2014. Wage cuts and managers’ empathy: how a positive emotion can contribute to positive organizational ethics in difficult times. Journal of business ethics, 119 (4), 461–472. Fazio, R.H. and Olson, M.A., 2003. Attitudes: foundations, functions and consequences. In: M.A. Hogg and J. Cooper, eds. The Sage handbook of social psychology. London: Sage, 139–160.
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Klimecki, O.M., et al., 2013. Differential pattern of functional brain plasticity after compassion and empathy training. Social cognitive and affective neuroscience. Available from: http://scan.oxfordjournals.org/content/early/2013/05/09/scan.nst060. full?sid=cb2c4503-297a-47fa-b9bb-7904050954f2 Krok, E., 2013. Willingness to share knowledge compared with selected social psychology theories. Contemporary economics, 7 (1), 101–109. Mattila, A.S. and Hanks, L., 2012. Antecedents to participation in corporate social responsibility programs. Journal of service management, 23 (5), 664–676. Roberge, M.E., 2013. A multi-level conceptualization of empathy to explain how diversity increases group performance. International journal of business and management, 8 (3), 122–133. Rosenberg, M.J. and Hovland, C.I., 1960. Cognitive, affective and behavioral components of attitudes. In: M.J. Rosenberg and C.I. Hovland, eds. Attitude organization and change: an analysis of consistency among attitude components. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1–14. Schein, E., 2009. Helping: how to offer, give and receive help. 1st ed. San Francisco, CA: Berrett-Koehler.
Ora Setter Faculty of Management, Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel
[email protected] © 2014, Ora Setter http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/14766086.2014.905222
