- 12 July 2024
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There have been lots of attempts to persuade us that looking after followers is the key to leadership success. This began, probably, with the Humanitarian movement, which grew from the Enlightenment and flowered through the hands of Montesquieu, Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau to generate ideas that led eventually to the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the abolition of slavery (McCloy, 1957; Warthon, 1983). In turn, Humanitarianism led to the various attempts by entrepreneurs (like Robert Owen and Josiah Wedgewood, and the Quakers such as Rowntree, Cadbury, and Lever in Britain) to construct a paternalistic and ameliorative approach to factory labor, rather like the original Hawthorne Experiments (Pollard, 1965) or the Industrial Betterment movement (1890-1920) (Rudin, 1972) or Human Relations or, indeed, the increasing influence of Human Resource Management generally (Bratton et al., 2022; Miles, 1965).
In the last fifty years, and increasingly so in the 2020s, the presence of pro-social or “Care-full” leadership has emerged as the latest variant of this. The first variant of Care-full leadership, Servant Leadership, started in 1970; Compassionate Leadership is the latest embodiment of these follower-oriented modes of leading. Much of the behaviors of Care-full leaders seem to be very different from the heroic leadership approaches that still persist in the literature.
Yet the spread of Care-full leadership literature seems to inversely correlate with the presence of the practice as more organizations appear to be led by “Task or Self-oriented” leadership where authoritarian practices still prevail. How might we explain this dichotomy? Furthermore, does Care-full leadership actually work? That is, does it produce the more contented and more productive workforce it claims, or does it operate to generate a contented but not necessarily more productive workforce? Moreover, why has the latest iteration of this approach appeared in the last decade? Finally, does exhibiting the practices of Care-full leadership enhance or diminish a leader’s prospects for self-advancement? In effect, does undertaking the follower-focused work of Care-full leadership sideline the caring practitioner and allow more traditionally self-focused, “Care-less” leaders to rise to the top of organizations? Of course, Care-less leaders do care, but they care about their superordinates, their shareholders, their tasks, and ultimately themselves, rather than their employees or followers — for whom they care less than their Care-full counterparts.
Epimetheus and Prometheus
The quest to generate a leadership model that takes responsibility for followers, employees, and subordinates, has proved to be an enduring element of the leadership literature. But at the same time, so has the recognition that many of our top leaders, especially in politics but actually in all walks of life and across space and time, appear to have the empathy of a sociopath — that is, little or none at all (Barreto et al., 2023; Metz & Plesz, 2023). So, we might say we all want leaders that care for us, but the leaders we often get don’t seem to embody this. To help try and explain this conundrum I want to start with the retelling of the myth of the Ancient Greek Titans, Epimetheus and Prometheus.
Titans were the original gods, before the Olympians took control, and it was Titans that ordered time and oversaw the beginnings of life, with Epimetheus responsible for creating the animals on Earth, while Prometheus was tasked with creating men (not women at this point). Epimetheus completed his task, ensuring that each animal had a skill to survive — such as speed or strength — but in so doing, he allocated all the available gifts. This left Prometheus with nothing to protect men, so he stole fire from the gods and gave it to men. Saving them aggravated Zeus who then chained Prometheus to Mount Caucasus where an eagle ripped out his (self-regenerating) liver every day (until he was rescued by Hercules).
Epimetheus then, captures the image of the task-oriented leader who completes their tasks — at the expense of humans — and satisfies their superordinate, in this case Zeus. Prometheus, on the other hand, threatens the organization and annoys his superordinate by focusing on people, rather than the task in hand. Moreover, Epimetheus secures some personal reward (the arrival of Pandora, the first woman) while Prometheus is punished. Here, then, lies an initial lesson for follower-oriented leaders — you may be inordinately popular with your followers, but if you refuse to understand the requirements of your superordinate, your followers alone cannot protect you from her or his wrath, and you are essentially limited in your career, if not actually doomed. So, what might be the problems with Servant Leadership and Compassionate Leadership — two of the most important forms of Care-full leadership?
Servant Leadership
Servant Leadership, as originally penned by Greenleaf in 1970, suggests that leaders should set out the strategic vision of the organization and then encourage the team to own the project they did not construct. Greenleaf’s model also encourages bottom-up positive outcomes but, importantly, not if they challenge the strategic vision already laid out by the leader. The Servant Leadership literature suggests that listening rather than talking, persuading rather than coercing, providing widespread training rather than self-oriented tasks, and building the community rather than building one’s own career, are critical distinguishing features of this humble and Care-full approach. In turn, this allegedly leads to a higher level of satisfaction, motivation, authenticity, ethical behavior, and accountability.
But what is the empirical evidence for these claims? Langhof and Güldenberg’s (2020) review of Servant Leadership notes that “Liden et al. (2014), for example, demonstrated that Servant Leadership creates a serving culture among followers which, in turn, can enhance business performance” (p. 33). But one study suggesting that Servant Leadership “can enhance” business performance is hardly conclusive. And the question remains, does such action lead to improved organizational performance and individual promotion or just collective appreciation? In other words, who gets to occupy the top leadership positions? Those who are concerned with the wellbeing of their followers, subordinates, and employees or those who are focused primarily, if not wholly, on their own task or career?
Canavesi and Minelli’s (2022) systematic literature review of Servant Leadership suggests that fifty years of theoretical development and practical deployment have generated some interesting data. First, as expected, narcissistic leader behaviors are inversely correlated with Servant Leadership. Grijalva et al.’s (2014) meta-analysis of the relationship between narcissism and leadership concludes that narcissism facilitates leader emergence but not leader effectiveness. In other words, narcissism gets you promoted but makes no difference to your performance once you are promoted. Narcissists — defined as having “a grandiose sense of self-importance” requiring excessive admiration, “a sense of entitlement,” “little empathy,” and who “tend to be exploitative, manipulative, and arrogant” (Grijalva et al., 2014, p. 2) — are often associated with leadership at the top of major organizations (Maccoby, 2004; Rosenthal & Pittinsky, 2006; Harms, et al., 2011. Many studies also suggest that the effectiveness of narcissistic leaders leaves much to be desired and can negatively affect organizational performance (Rosenthal & Pittinsky, 2006). This is especially so when time is added to the equation. What starts out looking like confidence and charm — because that’s what is associated with leaders — ends up being interpreted as arrogance and self-interest. In effect, the extraversion associated with leaders (their conviviality, entertaining wit, and physical attractiveness) is usually temporary because narcissists cannot maintain the fiction for very long. Furthermore, this initial misperception of the narcissistic leader conceals the reality of hostility, coldness, and arrogance, which are associated with Machiavellianism and psychopathy (Paulhus & Williams, 2002). Most studies show no linear relationship between narcissism and organizational effectiveness probably because, though their actions are not necessarily counter-productive for the organization, such leaders are only interested in their own success, (Grijalva et al., 2014, p. 14). This mirrors the work of Brummelman et al. (2015, 2021) who suggest that the attractive features of child narcissists to other children tend to propel them to positions of authority but have no bearing on their effectiveness at task completion for the teams they lead.
Equally problematically, it seems that narcissism (Maccoby, 2004) is more likely to manifest itself within leaders than overt concern for followers, let alone the combination of personal humility and dedication to community goals that Collins (2001) found in only 0.7 percent (11) of the 1,435 Fortune 500 companies he studied over a 20-year period. And of those 11 companies, only a handful remain successful and two went bust (Circuit City and Fannie Mae), though Collins (2009) claims that some of those failures were rooted in the hubris of success, the problems of scaling up success, the denial of risk, and the search for a charismatic savior or totally new strategy. Perhaps the original failure also relates to the dubious nature of his selection methods, that is both the companies and the criteria for success, but the point remains — there is a pervasive absence of (humble) servant leaders in successful large organizations (Heffernan, 2021).
The second issue revealed in the Canavesi and Minelli (2022) review is that while Servant Leadership is indeed associated with improved staff morale and employee commitment, there are very few studies that evaluate the utility of Servant Leadership for organizational improvement. Those that do, suggest that it may not be suitable for all organizations, especially those characterized by a fast-changing environment where decisions have to be made quickly, requiring a fast, top-down approach rather than a slow, bottom-up one. Another risk of Servant Leadership is losing sight of the purpose of the organization and its ultimate goals in favor of people development because the servant leader is, in fact, devoted to the individual employee and their growth rather than to the organization. This, according to Canavesi and Minelli (2022), “could have negative effects on the organizational effectiveness,” (p. 285).
Greenleaf based his original model on the fictional work Journey to the East by Herman Hesse (1932/2002) in which members of a religious sect, “The League,” take a journey in search of the ultimate truth but become lost in Morbio Inferiore, a gorge. Until this point their spirits have been buoyed by the servant “H.H.” who engages in a series of mundane tasks to keep everyone happy — much as Greenleaf’s Servant Leader would do. But when H.H. abandons the group, they fall into chaos and failure, blaming H.H. for all their woes. Ironically, this captures the main problem of Servant Leadership. Doing all the mundane tasks of a servant might keep everyone happy, but the purpose of the mission withers with the disappearance of the Servant Leader because the group becomes so group-oriented that they lose the ability to do the job they came to do.
Indeed, so. Finally, there appear to be no studies on the effects on the careers of those leaders undertaking this approach. In effect, at best, and as we might expect, Servant Leadership might be good for employees, but that’s about as far as we can go, and it’s something we might expect anyway.
The caring work that makes organizations function seldom seems to be rewarded by those at the top of the organizational hierarchy.
Compassionate Leadership
Compassionate Leadership is the most recent foray into this field of ethical and pro-social leadership models. Contemporary claims to the success inspired by Compassionate Leadership are especially common in elite sports, particularly soccer, and Bishop (2023) claims that Carlo Ancelotti (Real Madrid), Jürgen Klopp (Liverpool), Gareth Southgate (England men’s team), and Sarina Wiegman (England women’s team) are all examples of this approach where, “Compassion has been shown to decrease fear of failure and increase the likelihood of trying again when failure does happen. The ability to admit mistakes, embrace accountability for our actions and own the responsibility to make the necessary changes is the mindset needed in the search for improved performance.”
Perhaps. But the turnover of soccer managers in Europe is notoriously high and suggests that either Compassionate Leadership is only marginally present or does not actually enhance performance or is not rewarded. Watford, for example, had fourteen managers in the decade between 2013 and 2023, while Leeds had nine, Chelsea had seven, Manchester United and Tottenham had five each, while only Liverpool had just one (Ford, 2022). So, the evidence is mixed at best. Furthermore, the four managers cited above are in charge of elite clubs where the rewards for players are substantial. In effect, those players can have the best of both worlds: compassionate leaders and huge rewards. For the vast majority of ordinary employees and followers, the material rewards are as thin on the ground as Compassionate Leaders.
West (2021) is perhaps the latest well-known proponent of the Compassionate Leader model as applied to the British National Health Service (NHS). He claims an inclusive, empathy-based, and support-oriented leadership style results in the construction of a psychologically safe workspace that generates a more motivated, engaged, and innovative staff. This, in turn, leads to better results for health care. Dawson and West (2018) also claimed it produced better financial results, but this was actually due to staff engagement, which reduced sickness levels and thus the use of expensive agency staff. And Tzeciak and Mazzarelli (2019) claim that the absence of Compassionate Leadership — or caring — is correlated with poorer results and lower staff satisfaction.
Ramachandran et al.’s (2023) review of the Compassionate Leadership literature considers 41 articles over twenty years and reduces the concept to six factors: empathy, openness, health and well-being, inclusiveness, integrity, and respect and dignity. The review suggests that “Compassionate leadership is viewed as a leadership that embodies an act of love, care, and selflessness and enables a caring and supportive organization… Leadership at workplace is inexorably linked not only to the organizational productivity and performance, but also to the well-being and health of its workforce” (p. 2). It certainly sounds like a wonder drug and appears way more preferable to the authoritarian leadership styles that appear to dominate the news media. Though, as with Servant Leadership, there is evidence that authoritarian approaches are actually more effective than pro-social approaches under circumstances of threat or crisis (Pizzolitto et al., 2023). Ramachandran et al., then cite Guinot et al., (2020) as a study that points “to improved performance, trust, commitment, customer satisfaction, positive emotions, employee engagement, prosocial behaviour’s, employee attraction and retention contributing to their competitive advantage in the long run” (p. 5).
The data does imply that employee turnover is reduced with Compassionate Leadership, as Frost (1999) originally suggested, and Guinot et al., note that Compassionate Leadership reduced costs by helping those suffering grief get back to work quicker, as well as improving a firm’s creativity and learning by fostering a culture of psychological safety to admit errors and learn from them. However, the data only provides an indirect effect between Compassionate Leadership and learning. And if there is little organizational support for Compassionate Leadership, then it may well lead to emotional burn out for those leaders involved. Moreover, the data used in the study is from managers’ self-reports, not employees, so we don’t have a rounded, let alone an objective, picture of the effects of Compassionate Leadership. Elsewhere, the claims are that Compassionate Leadership reduces absenteeism and encourages engagement but Ramachandran et al., (2023) admit “the concept of compassion is often rarely expected and experienced in organization climates; this is particularly visible in the public sector. How then can a leadership approach of this nature be applicable and prove to be valuable in the private sector?” (p. 61). This is critical because, yet again, it reveals the gap between the proliferation of literature in support of a concept but its manifest rarity in the workplace.
Even within the public sector Ramachandran et al., (2023) note that Compassionate Leadership is primarily related to the medical and health industries rather than other public organizations. It is worth pursuing this issue a little further. After all, the health sector is allegedly one already suffused with compassion, so we might expect it to prosper there, rather than in the military or police, for example. But there is more to this than meets the eye. Is it a coincidence that Compassionate Leadership enters the hospital just as rewards and conditions deteriorate, so that recruitment and retention become problems? In other words, what Compassionate Leadership does is worthy — but insufficient. In England and Wales, for example, the NHS has suffered over a decade of austerity and inadequate funding by a sequence of Conservative-dominated governments and coalitions (Leys, 2020; Warren 2022) and, at the time of writing (March 2024), is besieged by strikes from Junior Doctors, Consultants, and Radiologists, and has only just experienced prolonged walkouts by nursing staff (Grierson, 2023). Indeed, in some ways the rise of empathetic and supportive management and leadership models mirrors the way the 1960s and 1970s witnessed the “regain control by sharing it movement” when British management began encouraging joint decision-making with trade unions after a decade of industrial disputes (Friedman & Meredeen, 1980). This kind of pattern — supportive (normative) leadership when the labor market is too loose to impose much discipline on the workforce, and authoritarian (rational) leadership when it is tighter — is precisely that outlined by Barley and Kunda (1992) in their review of labor conditions and economic circumstances in the twentieth century.
Yet ironically, those at the senior level of management in the NHS are much more likely to exhibit a directive style of leadership than is visible amongst military leaders, for example, than their middle-ranking colleagues, who appear more attuned to the Compassionate Leadership model or its equivalent, what Marshall et al., (2003) call a “facilitative” style. Moreover, “government” only gets five brief mentions in West (2021) and there is nothing about how the British government’s austerity programme from 2011 denuded the NHS of investment and led directly to the overwork and under reward that has seen so many medical staff leave and so few recruited. In short, Compassionate Leadership is almost undoubtedly a better way to lead a department or hospital for the staff, but it does little to tackle the underlying structural and political problems that undermine the entire system. Hence, West’s claim that “It is clear then that compassion may be the most important intervention overall in health and social care” (p. 58) is, at best, merely ameliorating a more important problem beyond the control of individual NHS managers or leaders. West (2021) claims that “such leadership must therefore be effective, inclusive and systemic (working across boundaries),” (p. 111) but the extent of the “system” he outlines is necessarily limited to the hospital, trust, or even the NHS — none of which include the government in their system. Later West suggests that the reason most approaches to change fail is because “leaders often fail in addressing such issues [climate change, youth unemployment, inequality and loss of biodiversity] because they do not embrace the truth that transforming systems requires transforming relationships among the people who shape the system” (p. 177). This is true, but unless you define the system properly to include those parts of the system that set the health context, i.e., the government, then no amount of Compassionate Leadership can stop the system from disintegrating because you’ve mis-identified the system.
So why do we still cling to Care-full leadership models, or even Authentic Leadership or Ethical Leadership models, when the evidence for their utility is limited, at best, to generating an ameliorative work environment? Indeed, supporters of all these approaches regularly claim efficacy based especially on their standardized questionnaires. Fischer et al. (2024) have the best explanation for that conundrum in their review that links the models’ “conceptual conflation with causal indeterminacy” (p. 2). In effect, these approaches conflate behaviors with subjective evaluations so that the ambiguity of the behavioral definitions ensure that there may well be a positive correlation between positive leadership style and positive outcome — but the former does not cause the latter. Indeed, the measures adopted misinterpret leadership style as a behavioral construct whilst ignoring other variables that may well have significant impact upon the evaluation. In other words, we know, for example, that people attribute leadership to those people that “look competent” (Todorov et al., 2005), to those who are taller (Brierley et al., 2016), to those whose faces match our assumptions about trust and leadership (Antonakis & Eubanks, 2017), to those who have a more “masculine face” and deeper voice (Little et al., 2012), and to those whose BMI matches our assumptions about appropriate body shape (Rahman & Navarro, 2023; Shepperd & Strathman, 1989). But none of these are behavioral concepts even if they significantly affect the way we attribute leadership to individuals. And that’s the point. We cannot interrogate the veracity of the claims because they are so subjective. For example, when we say Care-full leaders cause better organizational outcomes or better follower health, we can’t actually ascertain whether the putative links are causal or correlational. And, if they are correlational, then any number of intervening variables may have affected our judgement. It’s like when someone claims to embody ethical leadership. Ethical for whom? Because there are — and have been — almost no leaders who claim to be unethical. Until we can ensure that we can measure what we are talking about perhaps we should be more circumspect in our claims.
Conclusion
The caring work that makes organizations function seldom seems to be rewarded by those at the top of the organizational hierarchy. Care-full leadership might be really successful if work organizations were democratic — but they’re not, and the concerns of employees and subordinates carry little weight when it comes to leadership selection; what matters is the opinions of the superordinates. So, Care-full leadership has an ameliorative role to play and might lessen the negative elements of work, but it cannot transcend the system within which work sits. Moreover, Care-full leadership generates significant demands on the individual leader that may not be rewarded in organizations seeking out those more concerned with organizational goals than employee satisfaction. Care-full leadership may benefit the organization in terms of reducing sickness and turnover, but it is hardly the means through which organizational performance can be radically enhanced. We have had variants of Care-full leadership for over fifty years so we should have enough data by now to evaluate its utility, but the more interesting issue is why such approaches only seem to emerge when the shopfloor becomes militant. At that point many organizations appear to adopt a more conciliatory approach towards their employees because the alternative is to admit that the problem actually lies outside the control of its leaders.
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Keith Grint is Professor Emeritus at Warwick University. He has held Chairs at Cranfield University and Lancaster University and was Director of Research at the Saïd Business School, Oxford University. He is a Fellow of the International Leadership Association (ILA) and Professorial Fellow of the Australian Institute of Police Management (AIPM). He is also a founding co-editor with David Collinson of the journal Leadership, and co-founder of the International Studying Leadership Conference. He received ILA’s Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. His books include The Arts of Leadership (2000); Organizational Leadership (2005); Leadership: Limits and Possibilities (2005); Leadership, Management & Command: Rethinking D-Day (2008); Leadership: A Very Short Introduction (2010); and Mutiny and Leadership (2021).
