The reason for the confusion is because there’s no single right approach when it comes to responding to others’ emotions. Emotions are complex, and context matters—which is why we recently set out to study how leaders respond to employees’ feelings, and what kinds of responses work best. Building on our decade-long research agenda in the psychology of emotions, and hundreds of observed workplace interactions, we developed avalidated situational judgment task(SJT) to assess how leaders engage with follower emotions. And in using it we came to a surprising conclusion: Empathy isn’t always a good thing, and in fact can be exercised incorrectly. What matters most, we found, is whether leaders choose to deploy their empathy in the right way.