Empathy is an important trait for effective leadership. This article explores a psycho-spiritual approach to empathy and its role in women's leadership. It argues that empathy allows women leaders to understand employees' emotions, form interpersonal connections, and act as emotional healers. By accessing their own unconscious through empathy, women leaders can resonate with employees and foster generative empathy, vicarious introspection, and spiritual transformation in the workplace. The psycho-spiritual approach views empathy as a way for leaders and employees to experience self-healing and a sense of divine connection.

1. PSYCHO-SPIRITUAL
APPROACH TO EMPATHY - A
NEW PARADIGM IN
WOMEN’S LEADERSHIP
S. Alwin Mathan Raj

2. INTRODUCTION
Empathy in leadership
Empathy is an art, skill, quality and condition for
effective leadership. The quality of empathy will
render a new paradigm to women leaders as they
naturally manifest this trait in their leadership tasks.

3. Background of this article
 Empathy in workplace gives the capacity to work with diverse
personal and cultural backgrounds.
 It enables to respond appropriately to employee’s emotion in
their workplaces.
 It also provides the ability to understand the unspoken
emotions of other employees and groups in workplace.
 Goleman points out that empathy is a must-have virtue for
leaders because it can inspire, motivate, envision, and lead
others to greater effectiveness.

4. Strength of Women Leadership
 Caliper research and development department mentions in their Women
Leaders Research Paper - findings clearly show that openness, empathy,
and flexibility are significantly high in women.
 Karima Merchant argues that men use more task-oriented approach in
leadership, while women rely on leadership style heavily based on
interpersonal leader-follower relationships
 This feminine style of leadership is democratic and participative.
 female leaders assume a more “take care” leadership approach compared
to the males’ “take charge” approach
 Women leadership is transformational, relational, and democratic.

5. The problematic questions
How empathy could be a unique strength for women
in their leadership?
Does psycho-spiritual approach of empathy can
contribute to the effectiveness of women leadership?

6. Empathy – Meaning
 Wan Abdul Rahman mentions that empathy is the ability to
experience and relate to the thoughts, emotions, or
experience of others.
 Empathy is defined as a skill of understanding others’ feelings,
predicaments, and challenges.
 Empathy is also a skill of sensing other people’s emotions,
allows for understanding beyond someone’s apparent surface
behavior by putting oneself in another’s shoes and taking an
active interest in their concerns. (Goleman 2000)
 It means feeling into other person, getting into the shoes of
others and ability to understand others’ feelings and
thoughts.

7. Kakar’s Idea on Empathy
It is actually the ability to feel what the other person
is feeling.
It is ability to get into the other person.
It is like ‘You become blank in that state where you
will be able to feel the person who is next to you.
the empathy is temporary states of unity with the
other person.

8. Psycho-Spiritual Understanding of
Empathy
 Three different dimensions of empathy:
Empathy in spiritual healing - Guru-disciple
relationship
Empathy an immanent quality to experience the
divine
Empathy for connectedness with others.

9. Psycho-Spiritual Approach of Empathy in
Women’s Leadership
 The capacity of empathy the women leaders develop a capacity to
partake in the inner experience of another through unconscious healing
energy that covers over the underlying mystery of the process.
 It is understood that a women leaders have to adopt to surrender
themselves to their own unconscious mental activity to the employee’s
unconsciousness with their own unconscious.
 The women leaders’ unconscious resonance with the people oscillates
with a more intellectual attitude, to produce what has been called
‘generative empathy’, ‘vicarious introspection’ or ‘emotional knowing’.

10. Empathetic Women Leaders are
Emotional Healers
 Women leaders as divine parent
 explains the dynamism of healing with Kohutian psychology of the self
what he calls a self-object.
 Self-objects, strictly speaking, are not persons but the subjective aspect
of a function performed by a relationship. It is thus more opt to speak of
self-object experiences, intrapsychic rather than interpersonal, which
evoke, maintain, and give cohesion to the self
 woman leader who is very empathetic can offer easily this self-object
experience to the employees in a healthy relational workplace.

11. Empathetic Women Leaders and
Workplace Spirituality
 According to Mitroff and Denton (1999) spirituality is ‘the
basic feeling of being connected with one’s complete self,
others and the entire universe.
 This approach enhances the employees to experience
transcendence, energize them to work well and find
fulfillment in their workplaces.
 The empathetic women leaders in their connectedness can
become an agent for personal and spiritual transformation
of the employees in their workplace.

12. Implications of Empathy in Women
Leadership
 It enhances human relationships in work place and gives the ability to understand
the pain of the employees.
 It enables people to have the nearness of divine experience through the person
of empathetic leaders.
 It greatly diminishes the narcissistic tendency of ‘I’ rather it helps to develop ‘we’.
 It heals the wounds of the employees as one feels that I am understood by the
leader.
 It facilitates pro-social motivation among members in the workplace and to
handle the difficult persons easily

13. Conclusion
Women leaders are relational, interpersonal,
motivational and transformational. As it is women’s
natural strength who can become efficient leaders
easily.
The summary of this article is psycho-spiritual
approach of empathy enables the employees to
experience self-object experience in their emotional
healing and also to experience the divine.