Using a relational leadership lens, this study aims to gain a deeper understanding of empathic conversations with a focus on leadership ethics. It adopts an entitative perspective in relational leadership and examines leadership conversations as a two-way influence relationship, highlighting their interdependencies and collective role in the co-construction of meaning. Data from facial expression software and perception surveys are analyzed. The results of this study reveal the influence of gendered leadership on emotions, emotional bonding moments triggered by humor, and cultural dynamics in leadership conversations. Leaders’ feeling-based questions and participants’ willingness to share their emotions, coupled with emotion synchronization, create a constructive space where both feel invited, cared for, and valued. The study shows that emotional bonds foster the expression of generosity, care, and responsibility, enhancing satisfaction for both leaders and participants. Overall, this study enriches relational leadership theory and practice by underscoring the connection between empathy and leadership ethics.

Relational leadership invokes an ethics involving a leader’s affective engagement and genuine concern with the interests of others. This ethics faces practical difficulties given it implies a seemingly limitless responsibility to a set of incommensurable ethical demands. This article contributes to addressing the impasse this creates in three ways. First, it clarifies the nature of the tensions involved by theorising relational leadership as caught in an irreconcilable bind between an infinitely demanding ethics and the finite possibilities of a response to those demands. Second, it examines this ethical challenge in acknowledgement of the hierarchical discourses and power dynamics in which leadership relationships are constrained and enacted. Third, it proposes “ethical irony” as a way leaders can respond to the demand for ethics without resulting in either an escape from ethics, or being crushed by its burden. Three dimensions of ethical irony are examined: ironic perspective, ironic performance, and ironic predilection.