In today’s organizations, supervisors are encouraged to demonstrate empathy toward their subordinates—that is, to understand and resonate with their experiences or internal states—as a hallmark of effective leadership and high-quality supervision (Jian, 2022; Kim et al., 2026). This view rests on the assumption that subordinates welcome and benefit from receiving supervisor empathy. Yet, from the receiver’s side, being empathized with by a supervisor entails access to psychological or personal space that subordinates may prefer to regulate or keep private (Martingano et al., 2025). Consequently, receiving empathy may not always be experienced as supportive; instead, it may be experienced as aversive or constitute a violation of personal boundaries, particularly when subordinates are reluctant to expose their inner states at work (Longmire & Harrison, 2018).

However, we know little about when and why receiving empathy from supervisors may be experienced as aversive by subordinates, or how subordinates respond to it. Addressing these questions is important because supervisor-subordinate relationships are central to employee well-being, cooperation, and performance (Cropanzano et al., 2017). We use a top-down, bottom-up approach to explore the conditions under which receiving supervisor empathy may be experienced as intrusive, as well as its downstream implications for valued work-outcomes. Using a qualitative critical incident study (N = 152, Table 1), we first assess the prevalence of subordinates experiencing supervisor empathy as intrusive. We then investigated the boundary conditions under which such experiences are more likely to occur, as well as the work-related outcomes that follow when supervisor empathy is perceived as intrusive. We then used privacy regulation theory (Weber et al., 2021) as our primary theoretical lens to interpret the qualitative data, while remaining open to other potential theoretical lenses as well.

Results suggested that 38.82% of participants reported experiencing supervisor empathy as intrusive once every one to two months or more frequently. These experiences depended on various factors such as subordinates’ boundary control, supervisors’ personal self-disclosure, and their relationship closeness (see Table 2). With regard to outcomes, results suggested that experiencing supervisor empathy as intrusive can trigger negative emotional reactions (e.g., anger) and activate privacy-regulation behaviours, such as interaction avoidance (see Table 3), as subordinates attempt to restore their desired level of privacy. By qualifying assumptions about the uniformly positive effects of empathy in leadership (Clark et al., 2019), our research reveals the boundary-sensitive nature of receiving empathy and extends privacy regulation theory to hierarchical workplace relationships.