Cognitive Empathy’s Effect On Individuals’ Conflict Resolution Behavior and Success

Empathy is the ability to understand others. Cognitive empathy is understanding the emotions of others through ways of perspective-taking and more intuitive processes. This is distinct from affective empathy that is about feeling what others feel. We hypothesize that cognitive empathy encourages individuals to attempt to resolve conflict in their work environment earlier and more often, reducing conflict around them, while affective empathy reduces such outcomes. We test and find broad support for our hypotheses regarding cognitive empathy’s positive effects on conflict resolution attempts on 624 managers enrolled in a graduate business school with a multi-national and multi-rater dataset. These effects go beyond the effects of perspective-taking, which is shown to support success, but not attempts of conflict resolution.