The Compassion Advantage: Leaders Who Care Outperform Leaders Who Share Followers’ Emotions

Effective management of negative follower emotions in the workplace is critical for organizational success, yet how leaders can do this effectively is unclear. In 9 studies (combined N = 4,434 leaders, N = 1,006 followers), we introduce here the Compassion-Emotion Sharing Leader Focus task, a situational-judgment task to index leaders' tendency to focus on sharing emotion (emotion sharing) or caring (compassion) when engaging with negative follower emotions. In Studies 1-5 we provide evidence for the construct, predictive, and incremental validity of our task, highlighting the practical implications of a compassion focus for leader well-being. In Study 6 we leverage a diverse global sample of over 2,000 leaders and more than a thousand followers to show that a leader's compassion focus benefits not only the leader but their followers as well. In Studies 7, 8, and 9, we revised the task to improve content validity, but this traded off predictive validity. Our research suggests that training programs for leaders should emphasize a compassion focus to engage wisely with negative emotions, and ensure this focus is communicated to followers. These findings have important implications for current issues in management, including the growing importance of employee well-being in the workplace.