The awestruck effect: Followers suppress emotion expression in response to charismatic but not individually considerate leadership

Empathic organizational culture and leadership: conceptualizing the framework

Purpose

This paper aims to conceptualize and discuss empathic organizational culture and leadership along with organizational implications.

Design/methodology/approach

The authors reviewed literature to conceptualize empathic organizational culture and leadership. They referred to Hofstede’s organizational culture concept and studies on empathy to explore how leader–follower relationships are influenced by a leader’s empathic disposition.

Findings

Organizational leadership is instrumental in shaping employee performance. While work design, culture, peer support and resource accessibility are discernible, leadership style, control and others are covert. Leaders’ empathic attitudes and dispositions can positively influence organizational functions for improved performance. This review suggests that organizational culture should support growth, proper functioning and effective coordination between employees for improved organizational effectiveness.

Research limitations/implications

The authors conducted searches in leadership and management journals to help conceptualize leaders’ empathic disposition. Future researchers may explore other bodies of literature and the cultural demographic differences in exhibiting empathic leadership and its effectiveness. Researchers can explore how empathic culture relates to job motivation, satisfaction and commitment. The authors suggest that future research may explore how employees’ and supervisors’ behaviors and interactions can create an empathic organizational culture.

Practical implications

The authors identify the characteristics in an empathic leader to articulate the role of empathy in leadership. Alignment between person, group norms and organizational values is more important than the existence of culture.

Originality/value

Empathy is studied by researchers from various disciplines. Similarly, employee well-being has received attention from organizational researchers from many fields. However, researchers have given inadequate attention to conceptualizing an empathic organizational culture and its interrelationship with leadership. The authors offer a more positive perspective to the leader-member exchange (LMX) research by describing how leaders can sustain positive relationships with employees rather than the purely transactional exchanges that characterize LMX.

The Bottleneck Metaphor of Leadership Culture: How Shared Understandings About Leadership Develop in Groups and Impede Diversity and Effectiveness of Leaders

There are two big problems related to leadership today: unequal representation and high failure rates among leaders. This conceptual paper argues that commonly shared values, assumptions, and beliefs about leadership, i.e., universal leadership culture, are the common cause of both problems. After the concepts and levels related to leadership culture were explained, we introduce a multilevel, multi-actor process model named the bottleneck metaphor of leadership culture. This metaphor describes how leadership cultures are co-constructed by multiple actors based on their involvement in leader selection and reproduce themselves in groups over time based on emergent leaders' characteristics. Next, a diagnostic tool called “the leadership mirror” is proposed for organizations that want to assess their leadership culture's current state as a starting point for further interventions. Specific suggestions are made for various actors, ranging from individuals to organizations, for their possible roles in preventing undesired leadership cultures.

Leading transitions in traumatically experienced change – a question of doing or being?

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to explore change leadership in the context of traumatically experienced change. “Being-centeredness” is proposed as a change leadership paradigm, with the leader becoming a facilitative instrument who assists restoration of a healthy working environment, healed emotions and change transitioning.

Design/methodology/approach

This paper is a conceptual research paper. Conceptualizations of being-centeredness are developed by building on the discourse of change emotions in organizations and research on change leadership.

Findings

Change interventions are experienced more traumatic than often believed. Healing of these emotions is essential to avoid stuckness. Becoming an instrument of change enables being-centered leaders to assist the emotional healings of victims and survivors when change is experienced as traumatic, promoting individual transitioning, restricting resistance to enhance change readiness and resilience.

Research limitations/implications

Although conceptualizations are supported by an abundance of research and practical experience, as with any conceptual research, it lacks direct empirical evidence to support the conceptualizations.

Practical implications

Being-centeredness is an untapped inner capacity in many change leaders and change interventions. Explicitly normalizing and promoting being-centeredness and the further development of this capacity in leaders will allow this latent capacity to surface from its suppressed state, to be applied overtly.

Originality/value

The paper provides a new paradigm on leaders can and should deal with acute emotions that are often experienced from change, which focus more on the way of being of leaders, than competencies or change activities that must be done. This is likely to further emotional healing, change transitioning, resilience and ultimately change success.

Internal marketing in a higher education context – towards an enriched framework

Purpose

The concept of “internal marketing” (IM) has gained the attention of researchers over the past three decades. Though a lot of research has been carried out on this topic, it remains a concept yet to be completely understood and captured, with ambiguity in terms of its definition and scope. The purpose of this paper is to utilise the higher education (HE) context in an emerging country, United Arab Emirates (UAE), to argue that the term “IM” needs more unbundling and hence the authors propose an enriched framework with a renewed and relevant identity, which the authors term as “corporate fusion” (CF).

Design/methodology/approach

The authors do so with a renewed framework and philosophy that tries to capture new constructs and dimensions of IM in line with the emerging corporate milieu and has been applied to the HE sector of the UAE in this paper.

Findings

The proposed new conceptual framework identifies a CF philosophy building on the existing literature and captures the essence of IM orientation, albeit with its new constructs, dimensions and justifications. Furthermore, the authors argue that this new model is relevant to the contemporary environmental trends surrounding present day HE organisations, more so ever in emerging markets such as the UAE, given their growth needs in a competitive global marketplace.

Originality/value

In this paper, the authors take a close introspection at the contemporary role of IM in the HE landscape available in the UAE using a renewed framework titled “Corporate Fusion”.