Musical conductor's empathy and leadership, key competences for motivating youth choirs

Youth choirs are musical groups made up of teenagers and headed by a conductor. The latter, in addition to taking care of specifically musical work, should also oversee managing the group: creating a good work environment, resolving conflicts, etc. Empathy and leadership will be essential skills to achieve the success of this management. This study is non-experimental exploratory cross-sectional, ex post facto retrospective descriptive. The main objective of this study is to know the empathy and leadership capacity in Catalan youth choir conductors and if there is any relationship with the motivation of their singers. The sample is made up of 10 directors and 293 adolescents who are members of a youth choir. The instruments for data collection were the validated questionnaires: MOT (about motivation), TECA (test of cognitive and affective empathy) and LID (about leadership skills). In addition to the descriptive analysis, ANOVA and Pearson's correlation were performed. According to the results obtained, most of the directors show moderate empathy and high leadership abilities, both characteristics which correlate with the motivation of their students. These results are a starting point to think about the importance of the socio-emotional training of conductors in the future of musical groups.