Business Administration, Management, and Operations Commons^™

Interactive Empathy And Leader Effectiveness: An Evaluation Of How Sensing Emotion And Responding With Empathy Influence Corporate Leader Effectiveness, Gerald Burch

Theses and Dissertations

Empathy has been shown to be a very powerful social and work ability. This study surveyed 754 employees of a privately held eastern United States company, and incorporated annual performance evaluations to empirically link interactive empathy to leader performance of 102 leaders. Data was collected from the leader’s followers, peers, and supervisors and from self-report personality evaluations. The results of this study show that leaders that are willing to engage their followers with empathic displays are seen as better leaders from their supervisors and have more engaged employees. Other contributions of this study include validation of the interactive empathy scale …