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This study explores the influence of employee empathy on brand love, which subsequently affects customer advocacy, willingness to pay more (WTPM) and tolerance of failure. Additionally, it investigates the mediating role of customer delight and gratitude in connecting employee empathy with brand love and the moderating effect of power distance belief (PDB) between employee empathy and customer delight and gratitude.

A total of 751 usable data were gathered through scenario-based online surveys within a hotel context. The proposed conceptual model used Partial Least Squares - Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) for testing.

The results affirm the impact of employee empathy on brand love through the pathways of customer delight and gratitude, ultimately influencing positive customer behaviors, such as advocacy, WTPM and tolerance of failure. Moreover, the findings suggest that PDB diminishes the effect of employee empathy on customer gratitude, although it does not affect customer delight.

The study introduces novel insights into the significance of employee empathy as an antecedent of brand love. It contributes to the literature by concurrently conceptualizing customer delight and gratitude as mediators between employee empathy and brand love, consequently leading to favorable consumer behaviors. Furthermore, it advances our theoretical comprehension of an individual customer’s PDB and its psychological impact.

We examined how high school students demonstrated historical empathy through conducting local history place-based research to create an exhibit and companion book about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on their community. The majority of existing historical empathy scholarship focuses on classroom-based inquiry of historical events, people and time periods. We contend that broader examination of how historical empathy can be promoted beyond school-based instruction can contribute to the field by examining how student analyses of historical contexts and perspectives, and making affective connections to historical topics of study are needed when engaging in placed-based local history projects.

Qualitative case study methodology was implemented for this study. A Likert-scale survey with a questionnaire was distributed to 30 high school study participants. Thirteen students gave follow-up interviews. Students’ responses on the surveys, interviews and questionnaires were organized into three categories that aligned to the theoretical framework – identification of historical contexts of the sources that students collected, analysis of how contexts shaped the perspectives expressed in the collected sources and expression of reasoned connections between the students’ emotions and experiences during the pandemic. A rubric was used to examine how students’ writing samples and reflections reflected demonstration of historical empathy.

Students responded that their local history research about the pandemic contributed to their displays of historical empathy. Students displayed weaker evidence of historical empathy while examining archival resources to explain the historical contexts of the pandemic. Student demonstration of historical empathy was stronger when analyzing community-sourced documents for perspectives and making reasoned affective connections to what they learned about the historical significance of the pandemic. The place-based aspects of this project were strongly connected to the students’ engagement in historical empathy because the sources they analyzed were relevant to their experiences and identities as citizens in their community.

Documenting the diverse human experiences during the COVID-19 pandemic is crucial to preserving the history of this extraordinary time. Every person around the globe experienced the pandemic differently, hence riding out the same storm in different boats. At some point, the pandemic will appear in historical narratives of the social studies curriculum. Therefore, now is an opportune time to ascertain whether place-based local history research about the contexts, perspectives and experiences of community members and children themselves, during the pandemic can foster historical empathy.

Drawing upon the stimulus-organism-response model, this study aims to explore the impact of soft aspects of service quality on revisit intention through the mechanism of perceived empathy.

For the examination of the hypothesized relationships, the study adopts structural equation modelling to analyse the data of 562 respondents (i.e. 281 family members and 281 inpatients).

The empirical results suggest that service quality increased family member empathy perception, which, in turn, improved inpatients’ revisit intentions.

Past studies have focused on the roles of overall service quality. The authors have extended the literature by examining the specific but important aspect of service quality and its effects on emotional response. Importantly, the study explains that the affective reactions of a patient’s family, fastened with perceived empathy, have a central role in influencing the patients’ subsequent reactions. Moreover, the prior studies collected the data either from hospital employees or patients. However, in the present study, the authors used a unique sample (family members as well as patients) to have a deeper understanding. Thus, the study enhances the literature on the stimuli-response (i.e. service quality – revisit intentions) relationship in the context of service marketing in general and health care in specific. Important academic and managerial contributions and recommendations for future research are discussed.

This paper aims to explore the determinants of maternal and infant health knowledge (M&IHK) adoption and sharing in the short video from an empathy theory perspective. We explore how to transfer users from free health knowledge to health-related product purchase intention, which is vital for platform knowledge management and service.

Focusing on the M&IHK, this study proposes four processes of health knowledge adoption and sharing – knowledge quality persuasion process; source credibility persuasion process; affective empathy emotion process; and cognitive empathy emotion process – to build a framework of M&IHK adoption and sharing. Furthermore, based on adoption and sharing, we explore whether they can promote health-related product purchase intentions. A theoretical model is constructed and tested via Smart PLS in 388 samples.

In a short video context, perceived knowledge quality and perceived source credibility are still two determinants of health knowledge adoption and sharing. On the contrary, perceived affective empathy and perceived cognitive empathy are two new determinants of health knowledge adoption, but not of health knowledge sharing. Adoption of M&IHK is more driven by both rational thinking and emotional thinking than sharing-only driven by emotional thinking. Adoption and sharing both contribute to health-related product purchase intention, but the female’s intention is more related to rational adoption than the male, which is only related to emotional sharing.

This paper is arguably the first study to examine how short videos impact the mechanisms of M&IHK adoption, sharing and health-related products' purchase intention. It’s perhaps the first study to integrate empathy theory into health knowledge management.

To examine empathy as a trait that influences leadership behaviors, which, in turn, influence group decision-making.

This study uses an assessment center design to maximize internal validity.

The structural equation model shows that empathy strongly relates to both relationship leadership and task leadership, while cognitive ability only relates to task leadership. Both relationship leadership and task leadership exert influence over group task choice and group decisions. Thus, empathy has its major effects through influencing leader behaviors, which, in turn, have distal impacts on outcomes such as influence over decisions.

The study results should be further tested in field settings.

The findings suggest that organizations should recruit and promote leaders high in empathy.

This is the first study to test whether leader behaviors mediate the effects of leader empathy on group decision-making.

We examine whether supervisor support and empathy moderate the relationship between customer injustice and employee display rule deviance through a reduction in employee anger.

Working adults (N = 214) completed an online survey assessing their experiences with customer injustice, feelings of anger, and the extent to which they deviated from emotional display rules over the past month. Participants also completed a measure of trait anger (a control variable), and they rated their supervisor’s general support and empathy.

Supervisor empathy (but not supervisor support) buffered the relationship between customer injustice and employee anger. In turn, reduced employee anger is related to lower display rule deviance. Country (United States vs. India) also moderated the effect of anger on display rule deviance; the relationship was stronger in India than in the United States.

Service industry employees typically are expected to regulate their emotional displays by displaying positive emotions and hiding negative emotions. Meeting these display rules is considered paramount to providing good service. Unfortunately, customers sometimes treat service employees in a disrespectful or unfair manner, and the resulting employee anger may cause employees to break emotional display rules. It is difficult to control customer behavior, but our results suggest that empathetic managers may help employees manage the negative emotions that result from customer mistreatment. Thus, selecting and training managers to show empathy may improve customer service by resulting in more resilient employees.

Empathy, or the process of feeling or knowing how another feels, is a critical component of social interactions, and may be of particular importance to organizational functioning. This chapter addresses a literature gap on empathy in organizational contexts by providing a review of empathy research in a management setting.

We integrate the developing field of empathy research and provide a conceptual framework built on Ashkanasy’s (2003) five levels of analysis in emotions research, emphasizing within-person, between-person, interpersonal, group-level, and organization-level processes.

Our model addresses the complaint that empathy definitions are not consistent by illustrating how the level of analysis alters the view of empathy’s role in organizations.

This multi-level model of empathy provides a framework to identify gaps in the empathy literature and make recommendations for future research.

This new model of empathy will help practitioners use and understand empathy by providing a structure of how empathy is manifested in organizational settings.

The field of empathy research has been limited by inconsistent definitions and a lack of a model that outlines how empathy is used in organizations. This multi-level model of empathy provides the necessary framework for researchers and practitioners to advance the research and practice of empathy in organizations.

In a diverse society, empathy would intuitively seem to represent a powerful force for social good. In particular, we expect empathic people to tolerate (rather than reject) attitudes that might be different from their own, and to resolve and/or avoid (rather than escalate) potential disagreements with others. Some research supports this benign view of empathy, but somewhat surprisingly, there is a “dark” side to empathy, one that can sometimes exacerbate attitudinal conflict. That is, empathy can often be parochial, in the sense that people are inclined to reserve their compassion for others only when they are deemed to be worthy of such support. In this chapter we review classic and contemporary research on the light and dark side of empathy, and consider its implications for the kinds of dynamics that could potentially emerge when people encounter people and ideas that are different from their own.

Purpose – This chapter details the collaborative investigation of a neuroscientist and a literature scholar into whether reading literature increases empathy in health professionals, pre-health professionals and students outside of health care. It also reflects on the role of different epistemologies that inform researchers’ approaches, and muses on how ethnicity, sexual orientation and class inform research and teaching

Methodology/Approach – Students watched or read Margaret Edson’s play W;t and were asked if the medical drama increased their sense of appropriate empathy in medical encounters. The original research employed the Jefferson Scale of Physician Empathy, electromyography and galvanic skin response to measure physiological markers of empathy. These results were then compared to the self-reflection of participants to determine whether or not the physiological responses mirrored the self-report. The reflections on how emotion impacted the research were primarily narrative essay-based accompanied by feminist other literary theories.

Findings – All participants in the original study reported an increase in empathy after reading or viewing the play. This affect was even stronger when they viewed a live performance. The researchers determined that the role that their ethnicity, age, sexual orientation and class needed further study, perhaps with different pieces of literature.

Originality/Value – This chapter reflects the interdisciplinary and epistemological challenges of two researchers from very different backgrounds and training and investigates the relationship between reading, physiological empathy and perceptions of empathy. It considers the difficult and controversial challenges to quantifying emotions and the role emotions play in academic collaboration.