Empathetic Leadership – Key Element for Inspiring Strategic Management and a Visionary Effective Corporate Governance

The strategic management principles may provide a rich and flexible framework for the analysis of the key elements that underlie an effective corporate governance within companies. However, little focus is put on the analysis of deeper aspects of leadership – such as the empathetic leadership. In this context, this paper seeks to advance an alternative approach by examining the most commonly functional definitions and other features of empathetic leadership, along with its accompanying strategic managerial leadership abilities with the purpose of achieving a visionary, yet effective corporate governance. Soft skills (cognitive capacities and personality traits) – in general, and empathy – in particular provide a prototype of how leader understanding and support improves follower behaviours and, ultimately, creates the premises of an effective corporate governance in companies. Empathy is a construct, a critical skill that is vital to leadership, many leadership theories considering the capability to possess and exhibit empathy a key feature of leadership, especially for authentic, transformational leaders. We explored the connection between empathetic leadership, follower performance and the key components of a visionary effective corporate governance. Therefore, we aim to present a model able to explain the synchronization of a strategic managements and an effective corporate governance under the impact of empathetic leadership. The paper adopted a descriptive methodology in outlining the influence of empathetic leadership for an effective corporate governance. Precisely, we tested the causal processes by which empathetic language and behaviour influences follower attitude (these processes including follower job satisfaction and innovation). Moreover, this paper is concentrated not only on presenting the effects of empathetic leadership on the corporate governance principles, but also on providing a qualitative investigation on the current advances in the international management framework. Our findings point the fact that empathetic leadership entails that for effective corporate governance, companies have to grow emotional capital to handle issues of low morale, organizational stress, high staff turnover and lack of work/life balance. Supplementary, we find that the daily practice of putting the well-being of others first has a reciprocal effect in business relationships, in the way employees, clients, colleagues and partners are treated. We reached the conclusion that empathy enables the leader to discern whether the people he’s trying to reach are actually reached, allowing him to foretell the effect of his actions will have on core audiences (and strategize accordingly!). The paper propose that further research efforts could empirically assess the extent to which empathetic leadership can influence managerial competence in diverse cultures.