There is an assumption baked into almost every conversation about workplace culture and employee wellbeing.
The assumption is that the people promoted into management positions are, broadly speaking, equipped to lead other human beings. That they have the interpersonal awareness to notice when someone is struggling. The emotional capacity to create an environment where people feel genuinely supported. The empathy to understand what their team actually needs rather than what looks good on a performance dashboard.
New research from Zety and SIGMA Assessment Systems, drawing on nearly two decades of validated personality assessments across more than 4,000 managers in North America, has just put a number on how wrong that assumption is.
Managers score between the 27th and 39th percentile on empathy. Below the population average. Across every industry measured. Including HR. Including healthcare.
The people responsible for the daily working experience of your employees are, on average, less equipped to understand and respond to human emotional experience than the general population they are meant to lead.
That is not a criticism of individual managers. It is a structural finding about what organisations have systematically selected for when they promote people into leadership roles. And it sits at the centre of almost every culture, burnout, and engagement crisis currently playing out in workplaces everywhere.
What Below Average on Empathy Actually Means at Work
Empathy in a workplace context is not about being soft or emotionally available in a therapeutic sense. It is about the capacity to accurately read what another person is experiencing and respond in a way that reflects that understanding.
A manager with low empathy does not necessarily create a toxic workplace through malice. They create one through absence. The absence of recognition when a team member is struggling. The absence of adjustment when the pressure is clearly too high. The absence of the conversation that would have caught the problem three weeks before it became a resignation.
The Zety and SIGMA research found that managers also score between the 21st and 29th percentile on anxiety management and between the 33rd and 47th percentile on cooperativeness. Every trait in the emotional cluster measured below the population average. Every single one.
This matters because these are not abstract personality dimensions. They are the human qualities that determine whether an employee’s ordinary bad week stays a bad week or begins the longer, quieter process of disengagement that eventually costs the organisation far more than any intervention would have.
Modern Health research found that 60% of managers feel pressured to act as therapists for their teams, while only 23% feel equipped to do so. That gap is not a training failure. It is a selection failure. Organisations have promoted people with below-average emotional sensitivity into roles that require above-average emotional intelligence, and then expressed surprise when the culture does not hold.
The Business Cost of Leading Without Empathy
When managers lack the emotional sensitivity to read and respond to their teams accurately, the consequences do not stay in the realm of culture. They move quickly into commercial territory.
When leaders actively prioritise wellbeing, burnout drops by 71%. That figure implies an equally uncomfortable inverse: when leaders are not equipped to prioritise wellbeing, burnout does not stay flat. It climbs.
89% of burnout-related costs come from presenteeism, not absenteeism. The employees who are physically present but mentally depleted, the ones sitting in meetings and answering emails while running on empty, are costing organisations more than the ones who call in sick. And they are invisible to a manager who does not have the empathy to notice the difference between someone who is fine and someone who is performing fine.
Burnout costs employers an average of $3,999 per year for each non-manager hourly employee, rising to $4,257 for salaried non-managers and $10,824 for managers themselves. These costs do not appear on a spreadsheet. They accumulate in reduced output, increased errors, higher sick leave, and the eventual turnover of people who could no longer sustain the performance the role demanded of them.
Gallup’s research is direct on where team engagement comes from. 70% of the variance in team engagement is attributable to the manager. Not the organisation’s strategy. Not the benefits package. Not the office design. The manager. When the person responsible for 70% of how engaged a team feels scores below average on every dimension of emotional sensitivity, the engagement data that follows is not a mystery.
Why Organisations Keep Promoting the Wrong People
The pattern is consistent enough across industries and geographies to be structural rather than accidental. Organisations promote people into management based on technical competence. The best salesperson becomes the sales manager. The best engineer becomes the engineering lead. The best analyst heads the analytics team.
Technical excellence is measurable, visible, and easy to reward with a promotion. Emotional sensitivity is harder to observe, harder to quantify, and rarely appears in the criteria used to assess leadership readiness.
The result is a management layer that is frequently excellent at the job that earned the promotion and structurally underprepared for the job the promotion created. Managing performance is not the same as managing people. The skills that produce individual results are not the same skills that produce team wellbeing, psychological safety, and the kind of culture where people bring their full capability to work rather than the carefully managed version of it.
Only 37% of organisations equip their managers with the training needed to navigate the growing expectation that managers champion wellbeing alongside performance. The majority of managers are sent into roles requiring emotional leadership without the tools, the training, or, as the SIGMA data now shows, often the natural disposition to do it.
This is not a criticism of those managers as human beings. Many of them are working as hard as they can in a role they were underprepared for, under pressure they were not warned about, with teams whose emotional reality they genuinely cannot fully read.
77% of managers say their role is harder than ever. 81% say being a manager is less appealing now than ever. These are not people who stopped caring. These are people caught between what organisations expect of them and what they were equipped to deliver.
The Employee on the Other Side of This Gap
While organisations debate leadership development programmes and management training budgets, the employees sitting beneath a low-empathy manager are navigating something far more immediate and personal.
They are managing the daily experience of working for someone who does not accurately read what they are going through. Who does not notice the shift in energy that preceded the burnout by six weeks. Who interprets reduced output as a performance issue rather than a human one. Who checks in not because they have sensed something is wrong but because the calendar says it is time for a one-to-one.
Over 40% of employed adults worry about retaliation if they take time off for mental health, even though most know how to access care through work. The access is not the problem. The culture that determines whether using it is safe is the problem. And culture, at the team level, is shaped almost entirely by the manager.
When that manager scores in the 27th to 39th percentile on empathy, the psychological safety required for an employee to be honest about struggling is unlikely to exist organically. It has to be built by other means. And most organisations have not built those means.
59% of US employees reported burnout in 2024. That number is not explained by workload alone. It is explained by the sustained experience of working in an environment that does not see you accurately, does not respond to you appropriately, and does not create the conditions under which you can be honest about what is happening to you.
The burnout is not the crisis. The invisible accumulation of ordinary weeks under low-empathy leadership is the crisis. The burnout is just when it finally becomes visible.
Why This Problem Cannot Be Solved by Training Alone
The standard response to research like this is a management development programme. Empathy training. Emotional intelligence workshops. Active listening courses.
These interventions are not useless. But they address the symptom rather than the system, and they address it after the selection decision has already been made.
An organisation cannot train someone from the 27th percentile on empathy to perform at the 75th percentile through a two-day workshop. The SIGMA data reflects stable personality traits measured consistently across nearly 20 years of assessments. These are not skills gaps. They are dispositional patterns that training can influence at the margins but cannot fundamentally restructure.
What organisations can do, and what the most forward-thinking CEOs, COOs, and People Operations teams are beginning to do, is build the data infrastructure that compensates for what low-empathy management cannot naturally provide.
If a manager cannot reliably read the emotional state of their team, the organisation needs a system that can. Not to replace the manager’s role, but to give them the signal they are structurally less equipped to pick up on their own. The Tuesday morning when three team members are already trending toward disengagement. The fortnight when morale has been quietly declining. The individual contributor who has been performing steadily but whose emotional engagement has been dropping for six weeks.
These signals exist in every team, every week. They are just invisible to the person who, through no fault of their own, scores in the bottom third of the population on the trait most required to see them.
How Moody At Work Closes the Gap That Empathy Cannot
Moody At Work was built for exactly this structural problem.
The platform gives every employee a daily, anonymous, thirty-second channel to share how they genuinely feel about their working environment. The anonymity is not incidental. It is the mechanism that makes honesty possible in an environment where the manager’s empathy levels, however high or low, no longer determine whether the signal gets through.
When an employee who would not tell their manager they are struggling can still express that they are struggling, the data that reaches the organisation reflects reality rather than the managed version of it. The pattern of how a team actually feels, across a week, a month, a quarter, becomes visible in a way it never was when the only channel for that information ran through a manager scoring in the 27th percentile on empathy.
MoodyBot, the platform’s AI layer, does the pattern recognition that low-empathy management structurally cannot. It identifies which teams are trending toward burnout before the burnout arrives. Which departments are showing early disengagement signals. Where the gap between how leaders think their people feel and how their people actually feel is widest and growing.
For CEOs, this is culture risk made visible before it hits the P&L. For CFOs, it is the early warning system that connects people data to productivity and cost. For COOs, it is operational intelligence that shows where delivery risk is building before it surfaces in output. For HR leaders and People Operations professionals, it is the honest, real-time signal that every wellbeing strategy depends on but almost none currently have.
The research is clear on what happens when organisations get this right. When leaders actively prioritise wellbeing with the right data behind them, burnout drops by 71%. Engagement climbs. The 70% of team engagement attributable to the manager stops being a liability and starts being a lever.
The SIGMA data does not mean your managers are failing. It means they are operating without the tools to succeed at the part of their role that matters most. Moody At Work gives them those tools. Not by making them more empathetic. By making the emotional reality of their teams impossible to miss.
Moody At Work is a patented filled workplace intelligence platform connecting anonymous daily mood tracking and AI-powered insights to help CEOs, CFOs, COOs, HR leaders, People Operations professionals, and founders understand how their people actually feel, in real time, before it becomes a people problem or a business problem.
Sources: Zety and SIGMA Assessment Systems, Empathy in Management Report, March 2026 (4,000+ managers, 20 years of data). Gallup State of the Global Workplace 2025 and 2026. Modern Health State of Workplace Mental Health 2025. American Journal of Preventive Medicine Burnout Cost Study 2025. Worktime Employee Burnout Statistics 2026. High5Test Employee Wellbeing Statistics 2025. Wellhub State of Work-Life Wellness 2025.