Empathy and Narrative Transportation : fiction's Relationship to Empathy in Leaders

Abstract

Empathy is an essential competence of ethical leadership. However, business leaders are more likely to display and value traits like narcissism than empathy at work. This has prompted a need to explore empathy in leadership, specifically through its relationship to aesthetics as a potential source thereof. Previous research has shown that those more easily transported into aesthetic mediums like fictional narratives display higher degrees of cognitive empathy. Here, we extend this research into a business context, exploring the relationship between leader narrative transportation ability and cognitive empathy, using both self-reported and task-based measures (statistically controlling for gender, cultural background and English as first language). Leader narrative transportation ability positively predicted measures of task-based cognitive empathy but did not predict self-reported measures of cognitive empathy. These results suggest that leaders that share a positive relationship with fiction may be more adept at cognitive empathy, providing some justification for the role of aesthetics in business. Furthermore, self-reported cognitive empathy at work may be influenced by bias or misperception.