An Unattainable Emotional Advantage? Supervisors' Perceptual Biases in the Relationship Between Emotional Understanding Ability and Performance Ratings for Female Employees
Empathy is increasingly valued at workplaces as it facilitates interpersonal relationships, collaboration, and team functioning. Accordingly, organizations increasingly observe and recognize employees' emotional understanding (EU) ability—a key foundation of empathy—as an important dimension of individual merit in performance evaluations. We note that, however, supervisors' gender stereotypes may constrain whether EU ability is recognized properly, particularly for female employees.