Abstract
A growing body of research suggests that empathy predicts important work outcomes, yet limitations in existing measures to assess empathy have been noted. Extending past work on the assessment of empathy, this study introduces a newly developed set of emotion-eliciting film clips that can be used to assess both cognitive (emotion perception) and affective (emotional congruence and sympathy) facets of empathy in vivo. Using the relived emotions paradigm, film protagonists were instructed to think aloud about an autobiographical, emotional event from working life and relive their emotions while being videotaped. Subsequently, protagonists were asked to provide self-reports of the intensity of their emotions during retelling their event. In a first study with 128 employees, who watched the film clips and rated their own as well as the protagonists’ emotions, we found that the film clips are effective in eliciting moderate levels of emotions as well as sympathy in the test taker and can be used to calculate reliable convergence scores of emotion perception and emotional congruence. Using a selected subset of six film clips, a second two-wave study with 99 employees revealed that all facet-specific measures of empathy had moderate-to-high internal consistencies and test–retest reliabilities, and correlated in expected ways with other self-report and test-based empathy tests, cognition, and demographic variables. With these films, we expand the choice of testing materials for empathy in organizational research to cover a larger array of research questions.
Highlights
Due to technological advancements and increased globalization, the nature of work has changed (Greenhaus & Kossek, 2014)
Similar to Study 1, intercorrelations among the three facets of empathy show that emotional congruence is positively related to sympathy and emotion perception, while emotion perception is unrelated to sympathy
Reliability analyses performed on emotional congruence, sympathy, and emotion perception indicated good estimates of internal consistency at both measurement time points, suggesting that each of the three components of empathy can be analyzed on the aggregate level (α from .80 to .90; see Table 3)
Summary
Due to technological advancements and increased globalization, the nature of work has changed (Greenhaus & Kossek, 2014). The share of employment in service and health care sectors is continuing to rise (Eichhorst & Buhlmann, 2015) Owing to these changes, most contemporary professional roles require a high degree of empathy, that is, the understanding and sharing of others' emotions and experiencing sympathy with them. Scholars have repeatedly argued that selfreport questionnaires should be complemented by more objective performance-based tests (e.g., Côté, 2014; Wieck & Kunzmann, 2015). In response to these calls, several performance-based tests have been developed (e.g., Nowicki & Duke, 1994; Schlegel et al, 2014; Young et al, 2002). A closer look at these tests reveals that many are far removed
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