CoChat
Sign Up
Cited by 237Public Relations and Crisis CommunicationLeadership, Behavior, and Decision-Making StudiesJob Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior

The DOI matches its Crossref record; 178 of the 178 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.

A Blessing and a Curse: How CEOs’ Trait Empathy Affects Their Management of Organizational Crises

König, Andreas, Graf-Vlachy, Lorenz, Bundy, Jonathan, Little, Laura M.·2020·Academy of Management Review
DOI 10.5465/amr.2017.0387
Open this paper in CoChat — free account

Abstract

How does CEOs’ trait empathy affect their management of organizational crises? So far, management scholars have highlighted mostly positive effects of CEOs’ empathy in the emotionally charged context of crises. We combine the emerging critical perspective on empathy with research on upper echelons and crisis management to provide a more balanced portrayal of the influence of CEO empathy on crisis management. Specifically, we argue that, on the one hand, highly empathic CEOs will recognize warning signs more quickly, have access to more crisis-related information, gain greater stakeholder appreciation via displays of compassion, and be more committed to healing the organization’s relational system. On the other hand, they also may be more predisposed to false alarms, more biased in processing crisis-related information, overinclined toward apologetic sensegiving, and less committed to repairing the organization’s operational system. Ultimately, we propose that CEOs’ empathy influences their effectiveness in the various tasks of crisis management in an inverted U-shaped pattern. Our theory offers an upper echelons view of organizational crises, particularly by illuminating the roles of empathy and emotions in executives’ crisis management. We also introduce a novel, “too-much-of-a-good-thing” perspective on CEO empathy, providing abundant opportunities for future research.

Overview

Integrity signals

Registry

Crossref · 10.5465/amr.2017.0387

Cites

178 of 178 references verified0 citation errors · 0 not checkable

Statistics

Recomputing p-values needs the paper’s full text.

Verification

Claims the paper makes

This paper’s full text isn’t openly available, so its claims and self-check weren’t run. The registry and citation checks still apply.

Claims other papers make about this one

Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?

Citations

Cites

Flagged first, then by citations

Show all 177 references

Research works printed but not linked: 19

  1. Adams S., 2013, Forbes
  2. Barbash T., 2003, On top of the world
  3. Batson C. D., 2011, Altruism in humans
  4. Davis M. H., 1983, Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44, 113, 10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113 · DOI · Paper page
  5. Eppler M. J., 2004, Information Society, 20, 325, 10.1080/01972240490507974 · DOI · Paper page
  6. Fiori M., 2016, Are emotionally intelligent individuals hypersensitive to emotions?
  7. Fleishman E. A., 1963, Journal of Industrial Psychology, 1, 79
  8. Groopman J., 2007, New Yorker
  9. Hale J., 2006, Journal of Managerial Issues, 18, 301
  10. Kahneman D., 2011, Thinking, fast and slow
  11. Lafley A., 2009, Harvard Business Review, 87, 54
  12. Mitroff I. I., 1993, Crisis management
  13. Ocasio W., 1995, Research in Organizational Behavior, 17, 287
  14. Prewitt J. E., 2014, Journal of Management Policy & Practice, 15, 72
  15. Shrivastava P., 1993, Organization & Environment, 7, 23
  16. Starbuck W. H., 1977, Strategy + structure = performance, 249
  17. Strongman K. T., 1987, The psychology of emotion
  18. Webb E., 1994, Trust in organizations, 288
  19. Wooten L., 2007, The Human Factor, 2, 76

Cited by

Sorted by citations

See all 237

Related

Metadata

Authors
König, A., Graf-Vlachy, L., Bundy, J., & Little, L. M.
Affiliations
  • University of Passau
  • Arizona State University (US)
  • University of Georgia (US)
ORCID
Venue
Academy of Management Review
Publisher
Academy of Management
Published
2020-01
Volume
45
Issue
1
Pages
130-153
ISSN
  • 0363-7425 (ISSN-L)
  • 1930-3807
DOI
10.5465/amr.2017.0387
OpenAlex
W2892418580
Cited by
237
References
177
Citations by year
2026: 20 · 2025: 33 · 2024: 44 · 2023: 40 · 2022: 39 · 2021: 29 · 2020: 11
FWCI
33.38
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
closed
Locations
Academy of Management Review (publishedVersion)
Topics
  • Social Sciences › Communication › Public Relations and Crisis Communication
  • Social Sciences › Decision Sciences › Management Science and Operations Research › Leadership, Behavior, and Decision-Making Studies
  • Social Sciences › Business, Management and Accounting › Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management › Job Satisfaction and Organizational Behavior
Keywords
trait empathy, corporate crisis management, upper echelons, inverted U-shaped relationship, false alarms, stakeholder relations, sensemaking, too-much-of-a-good-thing effect

About these checks

Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.

Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.

Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.

What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›

Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review