Proactivity after a Rare Event : Examining the Role of Empathy and Attributions

We collected a sample of 167 employees from the travel agency industry in Taiwan a few weeks after a tragic incident that involved the loss of twenty-two individuals from two travel groups due to large-scale landslides. We predicted, and found, that the more the respondents empathized with the two travel agencies, the less they attributed responsibility for these bad outcomes to these agencies, which led to a lower degree of proactivitity regarding how they managed their own agencies. By contrast, the respondents' empathy towards the victims exerted a positive, direct impact on their voice behavior (the desire to express openly concerns about a bad situation). We conclude that those who respond productively to bad events are driven not just by cognitions, but also by emotions