Johannes David Hattula
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Dr. oec.
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Hattula
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Johannes David
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+41 71 224 2876
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  • Publication
    When Empathic Managers Misunderstand Their Customers : Evidence for a Self-Referential Bias
    (INFORMS, 2012-06-07)
    Hattula, Johannes
    ;
    Herzog, Walter
    ;
    Dahl, Darren W.
    ;
    Reinecke, Sven
    A core managerial task is forming accurate predictions about customer preferences. This investigation adds to the scarce research on this topic in two ways. First, our results suggest that managers use their own preferences as a cue for their customers' preferences. We label this tendency self-referential ‘bias' because managers' individual tastes are questionable predictors of customer preferences. Second, we examine how cognitive empathy, that is, the mental process of putting oneself into the shoes of customers to understand their needs, influences the bias. Although common wisdom suggests that empathy is associated with an increased customer focus and a decreased emphasis on one's own perspective, our results indicate the contrary, that is, the self-referential bias increases with the amount of empathy. This finding is in line with recent social psychological work according to which (a) empathy increases the perceived social closeness between observers (i.e., managers) and targets (i.e., customers) and (b) observers tend to assume that close others share their own preferences. In an initial experiment, marketing managers completed a case study on a product development process in the automotive industry. They were asked to steer the product development process by assigning importance weights to six product features (e.g., engine power) which were then correlated with their personal importance ratings of the features when buying a new car (as a consumer). For all product features, we find that (a) there is a positive correlation between managers' personal importance ratings and the importance weights in the management task and (b) the correlation significantly increases as managers exhibit greater cognitive empathy. Further results and implications are discussed.
    Type: conference paper
    URI: https://www.alexandria.unisg.ch/handle/20.500.14171/91488