I Feel Your Pain: Trait Empathy and Leader Reactions to Providing Subordinates Negative Feedback

Despite clear performance improvement benefits, managers are often reluctant to provide negative feedback to subordinates. Although prior research has identified negative feedback as an aversive managerial activity, little is known about why some managers avoid it. Drawing on self-regulation and emotional contagion theories, we theorize that negative feedback provision has negative psychological and behavioral outcomes for managers, especially those higher on trait empathy. Findings from a within-person study of the daily provision of negative feedback by a sample of 53 managers over 10 working days suggest that managers who are high in trait empathy experience negative effects on leader effectiveness and transformational leadership after giving subordinates negative feedback while those lower on empathy experience positive effects on these outcomes. Attentiveness and serenity mediate the effects of daily provision of negative feedback on these key leadership outcomes. Our study provides new insights about why some leaders might be more (or less) negatively impacted by the act of providing negative feedback.