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The benefits of an employee putting themselves in a colleague's shoes during workplace conflicts have been widely recognised, but researchers now say the cost has been largely overlooked.

"While staying with one's own perspective requires little effort, taking the perspective of someone else is an active cognitive process," say researchers Ulrike Fasbender, Wladislaw Rivkin and Fabiola Gerpott in their paper on the daily dynamics of perspective taking.

They began with a group of full-time employees who agreed to take on the role of perspective-taker, then asked each one to nominate a colleague to partner with. The resulting pairs were surveyed three times a day to investigate the impact of perspective-taking on the "focal" employee and their partner...