Leadership Empathy Research Articles

Empathic organizational culture and leadership: conceptualizing the framework

PurposeThis paper aims to conceptualize and discuss empathic organizational culture and leadership along with organizational implications.Design/methodology/approachThe authors reviewed literature to conceptualize empathic organizational culture and leadership. They referred to Hofstede’s organizational culture concept and studies on empathy to explore how leader–follower relationships are influenced by a leader’s empathic disposition.FindingsOrganizational leadership is instrumental in shaping employee performance. While work design, culture, peer support and resource accessibility are discernible, leadership style, control and others are covert. Leaders’ empathic attitudes and dispositions can positively influence organizational functions for improved performance. This review suggests that organizational culture should support growth, proper functioning and effective coordination between employees for improved organizational effectiveness.Research limitations/implicationsThe authors conducted searches in leadership and management journals to help conceptualize leaders’ empathic disposition. Future researchers may explore other bodies of literature and the cultural demographic differences in exhibiting empathic leadership and its effectiveness. Researchers can explore how empathic culture relates to job motivation, satisfaction and commitment. The authors suggest that future research may explore how employees’ and supervisors’ behaviors and interactions can create an empathic organizational culture.Practical implicationsThe authors identify the characteristics in an empathic leader to articulate the role of empathy in leadership. Alignment between person, group norms and organizational values is more important than the existence of culture.Originality/valueEmpathy is studied by researchers from various disciplines. Similarly, employee well-being has received attention from organizational researchers from many fields. However, researchers have given inadequate attention to conceptualizing an empathic organizational culture and its interrelationship with leadership. The authors offer a more positive perspective to the leader-member exchange (LMX) research by describing how leaders can sustain positive relationships with employees rather than the purely transactional exchanges that characterize LMX.

Morale and burnout in an Australian public school: A socio-technical systems approach

This exploratory case study investigated the link between morale and burnout in an Australian public school. Qualitative data was collected from 8 focus groups involving 47 participants. In analysing the qualitative data, an objective content analysis using the software program Leximancer was conducted. The findings indicated that a lack of support and poor systems (particularly in relation to behavioural management) were central to staff burnout and lower morale. A socio-technical systems framework including people, systems and tools was developed and applied to explain the results. It was argued that the attributional process of blame and a lack of perceived empathy (for poor systems) from leaders in the school was adding to feelings of low morale. The findings suggest that without empathy in leadership, attempts to improve morale in a workplace may actually increase burnout risk. The case study also highlights the buffering effect that ‘pod-synergy’ can have in mitigating burnout risk among teachers when there is a lack of involvement and empathy in the way decisions are made by leaders. Finally, a balance between the people and the systems is recommended so that there is enough autonomy for teachers to make situation-based decisions using their own skills and training without the demands of too much ‘red tape’.

Understanding Nurse Perception of Leader Empathy.

Patient perception of caregiver empathy has been studied internationally for decades. Although leadership empathy has been described as having a critical influence on staff retention, this subject is less evident in the literature. This article described a study undertaken to gain a baseline understanding of nurses' perceptions of leader empathy from those they identify as their managers. A baseline for nurses' perception of leader empathy has been established that may be used to benchmark future interventions to assess and improve nurses' perception of their leaders' empathy in the work setting.

Empathy in Leadership: Appropriate or Misplaced? An Empirical Study on a Topic that is Asking for Attention

Leadership has become a more popular term than management, even though it is understood that both phenomena represent important organizational behaviors. This paper focuses on empathy in leadership, and presents the findings of a study conducted among business students over the course of 3 years. Finding that empathy consistently ranked lowest in the ratings, the researchers set out to discover the driving motives behind this invariable trend, and conducted a second study to obtain opinions about possible underlying factors. The paper presents the findings of both studies, as well as literature reviews on the differences between management and leadership, a historical overview of leadership, a reflection of 21st century leadership, the ongoing debate on the effects of corporate psychopaths on ethical performance, and scholars’ perception on empathy in corporate leadership. The findings indicate the need for a paradigm shift in corporations as well as business schools in regards to leaders’ required skills, and suggest a proactive approach from business faculty to change the current paradigm.

Managing cross-cultural communication in multicultural construction project teams: The case of Kenya and UK

The increasing global nature of construction projects has highlighted the importance of multiculturalism and the new challenges it brings to project execution. However, there has, as yet, been no empirical work that quantifies explicitly the extent to which communication determines the success of multicultural projects. This paper explores the ability of project managers in Kenya and the UK in communicating effectively on multicultural projects. The study examines the cultural factors that influence communication and explores how communication can be made effective in multicultural project environments. Using data from 20 interviews in Kenya (10) and UK (10), the results show that communications within multicultural project environments can be effective when project managers demonstrate an awareness of cultural variation. Participants further highlighted that, one of the critical components of building multicultural project teams is the creation and development of effective cross cultural collectivism, trust, communication and empathy in leadership. The study underscores an urgent need for future research to investigate effective guidelines or strategies for effective collectivism and communication in multicultural project teams.