Empirically Based Leadership
A significant area of interest within the US Army empirical literature on leadership is emotional intelligence (EI), which in recent years has been the focus of considerable attention in relationship to leadership efficacy. Emotional intelligence involves an awareness of one’s own emotions as well as the ability to control them, social awareness of others and their emotions, and the capacity to understand and manage relationship and social networks.
In understanding others’ emotions, an important contributing factor to the success of the more effective military officers is their ability to empathize with their subordinates. In discussing empathy, FM (Field Manual) 6-22 defines it as “the ability to see something from another person’s point of view, to identify with and enter into another person’s feelings and emotions”. Empathy is not typically a quality that most soldiers would readily identify as an essential characteristic to effective leadership or necessary to producing positive organizational outcomes, but it is an important quality for competent leadership, especially as it relates to EI.
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