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This article presents a theory of empathetic leadership and its initial test. Empathetic leadership provides a model of how leader understanding and support improves follower behaviors and affective states. For this article, we explored the link between empathetic leadership and follower performance. Specifically, we tested the causal processes by which empathetic language influences follower performance. These processes include follower job satisfaction and innovation. Findings support model hypotheses and provide preliminary causal support for the model.

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Leadership language and its effects on employee affect and outcomes have experienced significant advances in research progress and practice in recent years. Communication researchers have explored and developed persuasive/framing models for practice to bridge the gap between leader intent and employee outcomes through verbal communication with the prospect of enhancing employee motivation. This article takes a unique approach to these questions by using a different communication model to clarify the nature and processes of the relationships between motivating language theory and its effects on employee self-efficacy and performance. Consequently, this study examines the role of motivating language theory leader language, with a primarily female group of 151 health care professionals, as an enhancement of employee selfefficacy. The methodology is a partial least squares model that explores the strength and direction of leader motivating language with self-efficacy and performance. All the relationships were supported as positive and significant. The partial least squares coefficients indicate that employee self-efficacy is 34% higher with increased levels of leader motivating language. The same data analysis reveals that employee performance grows by 20% with higher motivating language speech, and that employees with higher levels of self-efficacy will perform 10% better than in those cases when selfefficacy is lessened. Finally, future recommendations are presented to nourish these relationships through research-including greater generalizability, and for practice through training and development design.

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