An Exploration into the Potential of Empathy for the Selection of Retail Employees

Abstract

This study examined reactions of potential employees to non-routine occurrences in a retail setting. The purpose of this study was to explore the impact of trait empathy on preferences for entering helping situations in the in-store retail environment.Undergraduate students majoring in retailing or other business disciplines at a major Midwestern university (n=58) completed a self-reported questionnaire. The first two sections dealt with their reactions and their willingness to help in response to reading a group of scenarios representing situations that occur occasionally in retail department stores. Scenarios were generated using various sources such as personal experience, literature search and several Internet consumer complaining sites. The scenarios were brief descriptions of non-routine incidents in retail stores in which a customer is in need of help. They were developed to correspond to the three types of empathy (compassion evoking situation ~ empathetic concern; distress arousing situation ~ personal distress; neutral situation ~ perspective taking).Trait Empathy was measured using Davis's (1980) Interpersonal Reactivity Index. The multiple-item subscales measure the three different dimensions of empathy: empathetic concern, personal distress and perspective taking. Anticipated Emotional Reactions in each of the three types of situations were measured on five-point Likert scales by response to the following items: (1) Understanding Response: "I understand this customer's situation," (2) Compassionate Response: "I feel a good deal of compassion for this customer," (3) Distressed Response: "I would feel personally upset if I witnessed this incident." Willingness to Get Involved was measured by one single item, "Please indicate how much you would really want to get involved on scale of 0 to 10," where 10 indicates "want to help" and 0 indicates "do not get involved."Correlation analysis suggested that those who are strong in the "empathetic concern" trait are also better able to understand the problems of customers in need of "special" help and more likely to feel compassion for them. As employees they should be more willing to get involved in situations and to offer help to needy customers. There was no relationship between their "perspective taking" traits and either their understanding of the customer's situation or their willingness to get involved, suggesting that the cognitive aspects of empathy may not be as useful as previously thought. "Personal distress" traits did not seem to be as destructive to people's willingness to get involved as had previously been thought.

Fallacies in Decision Making From an Asian Perspective

“…The incorrect causal inferences lead to irrational or behaviours. In other words, people exhibit behaviours that are based on illusory causality in the environment (Su, Lee, Ding, & Comer, 2014). For instance, employees who wear a colour of shirt may perceive it brings good luck or blowing on the dice before rolling may perceive that their blowing behaviour and rolling the desired numbers are related.…”

Understanding nature of empathy through the lens of service encounter: a phenomenological study on FLE's

“…Mikkonen et al (2015) suggest that how experiencing empathy from important members for example their teachers influences students, their learning and professional development. An exploration for exploring the potential impact for selection of employees was done (Su et al, 2015). Patyal and Koilakuntla (2016) proposed a conceptual framework to investigate the impact of organisational culture on quality practices and performance, thus suggesting an integrated phenomenon for service quality.…”