Is Empathy a Value? Science Says It’s Your Greatest Asset
Empathy, a vital human capability, transcends personal connections and deeply shapes the way we live and work. Is it a value? The science says yes, and it’s worth more than you’d think: unempathetic workplaces put an estimated $180 billion at risk every year in the U.S. alone, according to Businessolver’s 2025 State of Workplace Empathy study.
Quick answer: Empathy functions as both a value and a skill. It’s a genuine priority worth holding, and it’s also trainable. Research across leadership, healthcare, and workplace culture consistently links empathy to better performance, stronger trust, and real financial outcomes.
The $180 Billion Case for Empathy at Work
Businessolver’s 2025 report, based on more than 26,000 CEOs, HR professionals, and employees surveyed over a decade, found that employees who see their workplace as unempathetic are 1.5 times more likely to leave within six months. Scaled across the U.S. workforce, that turnover risk adds up to an estimated $180 billion a year, on top of higher reported toxicity and disengagement at unempathetic organizations. Empathy isn’t a soft add-on here. It shows up directly on the balance sheet.
Empathy and Leadership Performance
It’s not just retention. A Center for Creative Leadership study of 6,731 managers across 38 countries found that managers who showed more empathy toward their direct reports were rated as better performers by their own bosses, and the pattern held consistently across the entire sample. Empathy, in other words, isn’t at odds with performance. It predicts it.
Empathy and Patient Outcomes in Healthcare
The pattern extends beyond business. Researchers at Jefferson Medical College measured physician empathy using a validated scale and compared it against patient outcomes for diabetic patients. Patients treated by high-empathy physicians were significantly more likely to have their blood sugar and cholesterol under control than patients treated by low-empathy physicians. Empathy changed clinical results, not just satisfaction scores.
Is Empathy a Value or a Skill?
Both. Empathy is partly innate, and developmental psychology research is clear that it’s also fundamentally learnable, built through practice like any other interpersonal skill. That’s what makes it useful as an organizational strategy rather than something you simply hope your people already have.
What This Means for Your Organization
Across leadership, healthcare, and workplace culture, the pattern repeats: empathy correlates with measurable outcomes, not just goodwill. Treating it as a core value, worth investing in the same way you’d invest in any other performance driver, is what the evidence actually supports.
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Want to bring empathy-driven practices into your workplace or your own leadership approach? Empathable builds science-backed training that turns findings like these into real, practical skills for your team.