Question

how does empathy relate to Emotional Intelligence (EI) and how can this characteristic increase a manager's effectiveness?

Answer 1

Emotional intelligence can be defined as Emotional quotient and it is the skill of a person to determine and identify the emotion of self and that of other individuals and to segregate the different feelings and perform proper actions. Self-awareness, self-management, self-motivation, empathy, and social skills are included under the head of Emotional intelligence

On the other hand, empathy can be defined as the ability of a person to understand or to experience the feelings of other persons which is felt by him or her from within their reference frames. In other words, empathy can be seen as placing yourself in the position of others and then analyzing the situation.

Thus from above definitions, it is quite clear that by having the empathy towards someone, a person can examine the prevailing situation from the context of another person. As in case of EI, the person has to take just decisions on the basis of analyzing the situation from different aspects without letting the feelings to prevail on him or her, thus empathy will also facilitate the grounds of making such a decision by considering the feelings or experiences of others

Emotional intelligence and empathy will help a manager to analyze the situation in hand from the different perspective. Thus the decision maker can evaluate the various conditions, perspectives and dimensions of a certain situation before taking the just and informed decision with the help of Emotional intelligence and empathy. By understanding the different dimensions of the situation, feelings of different individuals, the effectiveness of the decisions or actions of the managers will be more acceptable to everyone and thus it will help in improving the effectiveness of the manager.