Advisers

Maria Regina V. Baluyut

Discipline

Organisational Psychology

Abstract

This study investigated the relationship between empathy levels and leadership effectiveness of student leaders in the Hospitality Management Department at Bestlink College of the Philippines. The success of the hospitality management industry depends on intricate management, people-to-people interactions making emotional intelligence as an important quality of effective management. The research used a quantitative method which combined descriptive and correlational elements to collect data through two assessment tools including the Empathy Level Questionnaire and the Leadership Practices Inventory (LPI) assessment which evaluates how emotional intelligence leads to successful management in demanding service sectors. The results showed that student leaders maintain a high level of empathy which they measure at 2.75 while their Affective Empathy assessment achieved the highest score of 2.85. The assessment showed that leadership skills reached a high level with an average score of 7.76 while the ability to "enable others to act" reached an average score of 8.22. The researchers found that high individual performance ratings resulted in weak positive relationships which failed to achieve statistical importance because the p-value reached 0.07 resulting in researchers maintaining their original hypothesis. The researchers concluded that the weak and inconsistent relationship implies that empathy is not the major factor in contributing to leadership success in this context. Therefore, the null hypothesis was not rejected, which supports the view that empathy as a component of emotional intelligence does not always result in the corresponding increase in leadership performance.

Keywords

Empathy Levels, Leadership Effectiveness, Student Leaders