Beyond the Narratives on the Traits of Empathetic Leadership-Discovery from 20 Global Business Leaders

In the leadership literature, “empathetic leadership” as the narration of leadership traits is much more recent than that of other theories. Though empathetic leadership is a new behavior-based narrative of leadership, it has been attracting the attention of a lot of researchers around the world. P Progressing through the trajectory, the narrations on empathetic leadership have been focusing on trait-based theoretical explorations. Beyond narrations of traits and characteristics, inquiries on what empathic leaders do, what activities they focus on to create their enterprises as empathic organizations, whether there are any action-based models of empathetic leaders, etc. may enrich the leadership scholars. The present study is conducted based on examples of their activities and focus areas of empathetic action in order for their organization to examine the theoretical narratives of the earlier study. It has not been an attempt to refute all narrative but has been given an effort for narrative for empathetic leaders to prove with examples of global leaders. The study has clarified many traits and actions of empathetic leaders with a simplified, indicative model for explanation.