Thinking about You: Perspective Taking, Perceived Restraint, and Performance

Abstract

Conflict often arises when incompatible ideas, values or interests lead to actions that harm others. Increasing people's willingness to refrain from harming others can play a critical role in preventing conflict and fostering performance. We examine perspective taking as a relational micro-process related to such restraint. We argue that attending to how others appraise events supports restraint in two ways. It motivates people to act with concern and enables them to understand what others view as harmful versus beneficial. Using a matched sample of 147 knowledge workers and 147 of their leaders, we evaluate the impact of appraisal-related perspective taking on leaders' perceptions of knowledge workers' restraint and performance. Author biography: Michele Williams (PhD, University of Michigan) is an Assistant Professor of Organizational Behavior at Cornell University. Her research focuses on cooperative relationships, especially on projects that span multiple organizations. She concentrates on gender and the influence of relational processes such as perspective taking, interpersonal sensitivity and emotion regulation on how sustainable, cooperative relationships evolve. Michele is on the editorial board of Organization Science and an Associate Editor for the Journal of Trust Research. She is a co-author of the 4-CAP Leadership Assessment -a 360° assessment used by organizations to enhance the leadership potential of managers. She teaches negotiations to undergraduates, MBAs, executives and community groups.Authors Note: Proportions of this paper were presented at the 2014 Jepson Colloquium on Leadership. The author thanks Tony Kong, Don Forsyth, the colloquium organizers as well as the other colloquium participants for feedback on an earlier draft of this chapter. The author thanks Ling Xia for her assistance with the data.

Seeing their side versus feeling their pain: Differential consequences of perspective-taking and empathy at work.

“…A positive hierarchy gradient (when actors are higher relative to targets) bolstered the effects of perspective taking, but not empathic concern. Thus, it may be particularly helpful to have a supervisor who takes the perspective of his or her subordinates (Williams, 2016), but less vital that perspective taking looks upward on the hierarchy gradient from subordinate to supervisor. We were surprised to find that the advantages of empathic concern were not impacted by a hierarchy gradient between actor and target.…”

Being trusted: How team generational age diversity promotes and undermines trust in cross‐boundary relationships

“…Managers, who recognize that team building is not just about helping demographically dissimilar individuals build strong relationships but about helping everyone develop strong relationships in a more socially complex environment, will be able to approach culture change and skills training in a way that communicates the value for all team members. For example, team cultures that emphasize psychological safety (Edmondson, ) and perspective taking (Fehr & Gelfand, ; Williams, , in press) allow individuals to build trust in contexts that encourage risk taking and reduce individuals' tendency to associate blame and distrust with setbacks.…”

“…These different partners may vary greatly in the generational diversity of the team from the partner organization. Corporate boundary spanners as well as firm founders and non‐profit directors may first need to understand the potential sources of generational misunderstandings and conflict that may undermine their dyadic relationships and then use relational strategies such as perspective taking and threat regulation to actively build interpersonal trust (Williams, , , in press).…”