EMPATIJA U RADNOM OKRUŽENJU

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 teamoriented 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.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.