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Empathy, or the process of feeling or knowing how another feels, is a critical component of social interactions, and may be of particular importance to organizational functioning. This chapter addresses a literature gap on empathy in organizational contexts by providing a review of empathy research in a management setting.

We integrate the developing field of empathy research and provide a conceptual framework built on Ashkanasy’s (2003) five levels of analysis in emotions research, emphasizing within-person, between-person, interpersonal, group-level, and organization-level processes.

Our model addresses the complaint that empathy definitions are not consistent by illustrating how the level of analysis alters the view of empathy’s role in organizations.

This multi-level model of empathy provides a framework to identify gaps in the empathy literature and make recommendations for future research.

This new model of empathy will help practitioners use and understand empathy by providing a structure of how empathy is manifested in organizational settings.

The field of empathy research has been limited by inconsistent definitions and a lack of a model that outlines how empathy is used in organizations. This multi-level model of empathy provides the necessary framework for researchers and practitioners to advance the research and practice of empathy in organizations.

Few organisations exhibit the importance of physicality in leadership as explicitly as the symphony orchestra. While usually attributed to the direction of the conductor my own experience suggests that leading in orchestral performance is grounded in physical relations between individuals and among instrumental groups across the orchestra as much as in the interaction between musicians and maestro. In order to further interrogate this experience while enhancing our understanding of onstage relations among orchestral musicians, I recently undertook research that employed an autoethnographic methodology underpinned by the phenomenology of Merleau-Ponty (2002, 2004) and the sense-making ideas of Weick (1995, 2001a). Using this method while drawing on ideas such as kinaesthetic empathy (Pallaro, 1995; Parviainen, 2002), the picture presented in what follows is one of leadership embedded in physical interaction among colleagues.

This interaction is, I suggest, based on sense-making and sense-giving activity that occurs in a ‘kinaesthetic loop’ that draws on and is generated by auditory, visual and gestural information given and received by individual musicians. This activity in turn mediates the acoustic space between musicians and thus, ultimately, determines how leadership and coordination in the orchestra are constituted. Rather than being disembodied products of dictatorial direction dispensed through the orchestra’s hierarchy, orchestral performance and leadership emerge in this more nuanced account as co-creative processes in which all the musicians on stage share responsibility.

To examine empathy as a trait that influences leadership behaviors, which, in turn, influence group decision-making.

This study uses an assessment center design to maximize internal validity.

The structural equation model shows that empathy strongly relates to both relationship leadership and task leadership, while cognitive ability only relates to task leadership. Both relationship leadership and task leadership exert influence over group task choice and group decisions. Thus, empathy has its major effects through influencing leader behaviors, which, in turn, have distal impacts on outcomes such as influence over decisions.

The study results should be further tested in field settings.

The findings suggest that organizations should recruit and promote leaders high in empathy.

This is the first study to test whether leader behaviors mediate the effects of leader empathy on group decision-making.

Flow-based leadership exists when leaders commit to maximizing their own peak performance (“flow”) and to facilitating the flow states of others. This results in team and organizational flow. Meaning making is what binds an organization to its purpose. A recent McKinsey study shows that when people work in flow, their productivity increases by five-fold and has the effect of elevating individual, as well as organizational, well-being. However, as leaders come and go in organizations, the commitment to a model of meaning-making and sustained peak performance can be tainted through politics, silos, and personalities as varied as the leaders themselves. How can an organization sustain a flow-based culture over long periods regardless of who is leading it. 

Georgia Smoke Diver (GSD) is an extreme, experiential training program in the fire service. There are over 1,000 GSDs as of this writing. At least 100 of these come back twice a year to help teach the class, which has about 40 students, on their own time and for no pay. They take time away from their families, often using precious vacation time, because they are committed to making firefighters better. This program changes lives. Since 1978, GSD practices mindful leadership development for growing and mentoring leaders. Their model of flow-based leadership fosters cultural intelligence and social capital to identify and nurture leaders over time. This chapter explores the dynamics of how GSD uses design principles to balance deliberate and organically driven leadership development.