Empathy As An Effective Service Leader: The Competence Of Service Leadership

Introduction Service Leadership refers to the service that satisfying distinct level of needs, such as self, others, communities, society and environment. An Effective Service Leader (E) encompasses three attributes, including Moral Character (M), Competence of Leadership (C) and Caring Disposition (C), which forms the equation of E=MC^2. In this essay, empathy, which is one of the element of Caring Disposition, will be regarded as a determinant to demonstrate the validity of effective service leadership. This essay focus on the element of empathy to discover the importance of caring in achieving service leader. It will discuss the strength of empathy to become effective service leadership, the limitations and constraints of it in practice,

As an effective service leadership, for the attribute of Caring disposition, the priority mission is to satisfy needs of others. The needs may include caring, understanding of feeling and varies kind of support. People always need care in their suffering moments. If a leader has the ability of empathy to care people, they can feel what other’s feeling and consider other’s problem as their own, and show understanding “in a helpful (therapeutic) way” (Mercer & Reynolds, 2002, p.S11). According to the research from Mercer & Reynolds (2002), patients with cancer, who receive a high level of empathy from nurses, show an emotional decrease in anxiety, depression, and hostility. In this case, the nurses act as a service leader that provide care and opportunity for patients to share their feeling and let them receive love from others. The nurses understand the situation of the patients and realize the needs of the patients as they feel the patient experience as their own. Apart from medical supports, providing empathy to the patient is more important in order to alleviate the negative emotion. Therefore, an effective service leadership should possess the ability of empathy to care people so as to satisfy people

Misusing the empathy into sympathy will not help become an effective service leadership as it cannot find the exact needs of the others. Some people may use sympathy as empathy as they do not truly understand the meaning of empathy and sympathy. The difference between empathy and sympathy is that, empathy is a process to input effort to attempt to “comprehend another’s experience”, while sympathy is a “direct perceptual awareness of another person’s experience” (Decety & Chaminade, 2003, p.127). For personal experience, one time, a friend felt hungry, the possible solution was suggested to buy a food to eat, however, the problem that lead to hunger was lack of money. In this case, the need is not the food but money. Sympathy can only see other’s situation or circumstance apparently, but cannot feel what exactly the person needs and recognize the difficulties of the situation. As a result, a satisfying support of care may not be provided as a low level of empathy is adopted, which is