Competing Sexes, Power, and Testosterone: How Winning and Losing Affect People's Empathic Responses and What this Means for Organisations

Abstract

We introduce a biopsychosocial model to explain how men's and women's testosterone fluctuations ensuing from winning and losing status in intrasexual competitions affect their proactive and reactive aggression, as well as their accuracy at assessing others' emotions (empathic accuracy) and anxiety at witnessing others' pain (personal distress). We also propose that their empathic responses depend on the extent to which they are driven by a need to influence other people (implicit power motivation). To our knowledge, this is among the first articles to offer a comprehensive investigation of the physiological and psychological effects that competitive outcomes have on individuals' empathic responses. Given that competition is ubiquitous in organisational life, we sensitise practitioners to its effect on empathy in the workplace and give recommendations on how they could foster a healthy work environment. Finally, to encourage scholars along this research avenue, we provide concrete suggestions for empirically testing our model and advise them to probe other hormones, as well as other empathic responses and non-hormonal mechanisms that may assist in further explaining the competition-empathy link.

Testosterone and Tendency to Engage in Self-Employment

“…These biopsychosocial models could explain differences in communication patterns among male and female employees (Case and Oetama-Paul 2015). Testosterone levels, in contexts of win-loss, influence behavioral, cognitive and affective exchanges among employees (Vongas and Al Hajj 2015). Suppressive and aggressive behaviors are biologically manifested and could have long-term health consequences (Kim and James 2015).…”

The Evolution of Empathy and Women’s Precarious Leadership Appointments

“…For example, highly empathic individuals have long been regarded as tactful and imaginative or creative ( Hogan, 1969 ). Empathic accuracy is one’s ability to accurately infer another’s feelings and it is the aspect of empathy that corresponds to intuition ( Greenson, 1977 ; Vongas and Al Hajj, 2015 ). Lastly, being understanding is central to the empathic experience because it relates to perspective taking, itself a key subdimension of empathy ( Davis, 1980 ).…”

The Hazard of Teetering at the Top and Being Tied to the Bottom: The Interactive Relationship of Power, Stability, and Social Dominance Orientation with Work Stress

“…Beyond addressing such limitations, future research could expand the present model by examining other potential moderators of the relationship between power, stability, and stress. In addition to SDO, for example, preexisting physiological states, such as testosterone levels (Mehta et al, 2008;Vongas & Al Hajj, 2015), could moderate these interactive effects, with high testosterone exacerbating and low testosterone attenuating the pattern witnessed in the current study. Prior research on humans and non-human primates, accordingly, has linked testosterone to increased dominance (Borowski, Malinowska, & Ksia˛_ zek, 2014;Mehta & Josephs, 2010;Ostner, Heistermann, & Sch€ ulke, 2008).…”