Professional paper
EMPATHY IN WORKING ENVIRONMENT
Ana Marguerite Tomulić
; Croatian Chamber of Economy, Zagreb, Croatia
Tanja Grmuša
; Zagreb School of Business, Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The accelerated pace of global competition imposes new rules and changes in the business environment: employers are looking for a different kind of employee profiles and value specific competences such as flexibility, teamwork abilities and empathic and social skills. Successful and progressive organizations, aware of the fact that "soft" skills represent an ideal tool for creating emotionally intelligent and team-oriented working environments, are now adopting new organization management philosophies, according to which the person, whether it concerns the employee or the client, becomes the focus of the organization itself. This new concept of organizational culture includes a new approach towards the employee, according to which the employee is no longer perceived as an automated tool to achieve organizational goals, but as a collaborator and the most important value of the organization. Given the fact that Croatia is a transitional country, which is trying, by creating new values and cultural framework, to lay the foundation for a more competitive business environment, we wanted to know how the employees of Zagreb perceived the level of empathy in their working environment. A study conducted on a sample of one hundred and thirty respondents showed encouraging results in relation to the perceived level of empathy in the horizontal and vertical internal communication. However the results related to the organizational culture as a basis for the development of empathy still tend to a negative perception.
Keywords
organizational culture; communication climate; internal communication; empathy, teamwork
Hrčak ID:
199664
URI
Publication date:
30.10.2017.
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