From empathic leader to empathic leadership practice: An extension to relational leadership theory
批评了传统领导力研究将共情视为领导者个人特质的局限，提出共情是一种社会建构过程，通过对话和叙事实践在关系中形成，从而扩展了关系领导理论。
Does empathy merely take place in leaders’ minds? How does it help us better understand and practice leadership? In the past, entitative relational leadership studies have mainly drawn on a mind-based understanding of empathy and focused on the association between individual empathy traits and leader emergence and effectiveness. Such an approach overlooks leadership practice of empathy as a constructive process. By integrating emerging research from diverse disciplines from philosophy to communication, the article first offers a constructionist view of empathy, based on which empathic leadership practice is conceptualized. The article explicates how leadership practice of empathy construction is rooted in relational ethics and takes place in both synchronic dyadic interaction through conversation as well as diachronic narrative practice with a collective other. By conceptualizing empathic leadership practice through a social constructionist approach to empathy, the article makes significant contributions to our understanding of relational leadership.