Views on empathy and leadership in business schools: An empirical study of undergraduate students

Abstract

The authors examine the perceptions of undergraduate students with business majors to determine the leadership competencies they most value. Prior research examined business major rankings in a smaller private school. This research examined the generalizability of those findings by surveying 667 students from a regional public college in the Southeast of the USA. The study also examined student empathy and age, as a representation of life experience, as indicators of preferred leadership trait rankings. Students ranked 10 leadership competencies and both student empathy and age were examined in relation to those 10 competencies through ordinal regression. The results indicate that both empathy and age influence leadership competency preference. The specifics of those findings as well as the theoretical and practical implications are discussed, as are potential directions for future research.