Feeling empathy for organizations: Moral consequences, mechanisms, and the power of framing

Do Companies Think and Feel? Mind Perception of Organizations

How do people perceive the minds of organizations? Existing work on organizational mind perception highlights two key debates: whether organizational groups are ascribed more agency than experience, and whether people are really perceiving minds in organizational groups at all. Our current paper and its data weigh in on these debates and suggest that organizations can indeed be ascribed experiential minds. We present a "member and goals" framework for systematically understanding the mind perception of organization. This framework suggests that people can perceive the organizational mind through its elemental building blocks: members (people who form the organization) and goals (its aims). Four studies reveal that people ascribe agency and experience to organizations based on whether the members of organizations and the goals of the organization are characterized by agency or experience. Study 1 finds that past work on mind perception often examines for-profit corporations, which consist of agentic members (corporate professionals) and agentic goals (market competition). Studies 2 and 3 reveal that when an organization with members and goals high (vs. low) in experience, people imbue its mind with perceived experience-equal to that of a person-and that even emotions low in warmth (i.e., anger) can imbue an organization with such perceptions. Study 4 shows the moral consequences of emphasizing experience: after organizational wrongdoing, experiential organizations are seen to deliver more sincere apologies and are more forgiven.

A whirlpool of emotion: How entrepreneurs’ empathy affects employees‘ emotional exhaustion

Drawing upon upper echelons and self-determination theories, we hypothesize and test a mediating process linking entrepreneurs’ empathy to employees‘ emotional exhaustion and the moderating role of psychological empowerment. Based on a dyadic-survey study of entrepreneurs and their employees in high-tech new ventures in China, we conducted the empirical test by using hierarchical linear modeling (HLM) and found that entrepreneurs’ empathy has a negative effect on employees‘ emotional exhaustion, and psychological empowerment not only partially mediates the relationship between entrepreneurs’ empathy and employees‘ emotional exhaustion but also positively moderates the above relationship. This study frames an integrative perspective of emotions and psychologies and sheds a nuanced understanding of the mechanisms linking empathy with emotional exhaustion. Limitations and future directions are addressed.

To Blame or Not? Modulating Third-Party Punishment with the Framing Effect

People as third-party observers, without direct self-interest, may punish norm violators to maintain social norms. However, third-party judgment and the follow-up punishment might be susceptible to the way we frame (i.e., verbally describe) a norm violation. We conducted a behavioral and a neuroimaging experiment to investigate the above phenomenon, which we call the "third-party framing effect". In these experiments, participants observed an anonymous perpetrator deciding whether to keep her/his economic benefit while exposing a victim to a risk of physical pain (described as "harming others" in one condition and "not helping others" in the other condition), then they had a chance to punish that perpetrator at their own cost. Our results showed that the participants were more willing to execute third-party punishment under the harm frame compared to the help frame, manifesting a framing effect. Self-reported anger toward perpetrators mediated the relationship between empathy toward victims and the framing effect. Meanwhile, activation of the insula mediated the relationship between mid-cingulate cortex activation and the framing effect; the functional connectivity between these regions significantly predicted the size of the framing effect. These findings shed light on the psychological and neural mechanisms of the third-party framing effect.