Organizational Compassion Research Articles

Battling the barriers to compassion in organizations

Battling the barriers to compassion in organizations

Managing Distress and Expressing Compassion in Organizations

Managing Distress and Expressing Compassion in Organizations

How Mindfulness-Trained Leaders Drive Compassion in Organizations

How Mindfulness-Trained Leaders Drive Compassion in Organizations

Organizational compassion, employees' mental health, commitment and engagement in the context of COVID-19: a serial mediation analysis

PurposeThe study examines the effects of organizational compassion during the COVID-19 pandemic on teachers' mental health and, consequently, their commitment and work engagement. The study tests a serial mediation model for the effects of organizational compassion on employee engagement via mental health and the three components of organizational commitment.Design/methodology/approachA cross-sectional sample (N = 436) completed an online questionnaire towards the end of the prolonged lockdown of schools in Uganda (2021–2022). Serial mediation analysis in PROCESS Macro was employed to test the hypotheses.FindingsAs hypothesized, organizational compassion was significantly related to teachers' mental health, the three components of organizational commitment, and employee engagement. A double mediation path of the effects of organizational compassion on employee engagement via mental health and affective commitment was significant.Practical implicationsThe findings highlight how organizational compassion benefits employees’ psychological health and work attitudes and behavior. The findings draw attention to the need to design compassion practices that boost the emotional value of organizational compassion to the individual over the economic and normative value.Originality/valueThe study contributes to the literature on organizational compassion outcomes by focusing on employee engagement and the underlying mediating mechanisms. The study is also one of the few that has examined the effects of organizational compassion on the three components of organizational commitment.

Relation between Organizational Compassion and Work Engagement among Nurses at Health Care Organizations

Relation between Organizational Compassion and Work Engagement among Nurses at Health Care Organizations

A Conceptual Model of Organizational Compassion in Healthcare

A Conceptual Model of Organizational Compassion in Healthcare

Leading matters! Linking compassion and mindfulness in organizations through servant leadership.

Regardless of where they are, humans are inherently human. In this study, we explore the relationship between compassion, mindfulness, and servant leadership contributing to an overall feeling of safety. Adopting a humanistic approach to human resource management, we examine how compassion and mindfulness intersect under the lens of the Conservation of Resources (COR) theory. Our investigation focuses on understanding how servant leadership facilitates the cultivation of mindfulness through compassion. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), we analyze data gathered from 360 workers across diverse occupational sectors. Our findings provide empirical support for the hypothesis that compassion, manifested as a response to suffering, enhances mindfulness levels in the workplace. Specifically, we observe that organizations promoting servant leadership principles are conducive to higher levels of mindfulness among employees. Practically, our study underscores the importance of designing work contexts that prioritize compassion and servant leadership. By doing so, organizations can foster a positive work environment that promotes mindfulness and enhances workplace safety. Our research contributes to the management literature by offering empirical evidence on the role of servant leadership in cultivating compassion and mindfulness, thereby advancing the discourse on workplace safety and organizational well-being.

Job Insecurity during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Teachers’ Psychological Wellbeing, and Job Attitudes: Organizational Compassion as a Buffer

Job Insecurity during the COVID-19 Pandemic, Teachers’ Psychological Wellbeing, and Job Attitudes: Organizational Compassion as a Buffer

Cultivating staff equality, diversity, and inclusion in higher education in the post-pandemic era: an organizational compassion perspective.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exacerbated pre-existing challenges faced by academic staff in UK higher education and drawn attention to issues of Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI). Amidst global competitiveness and workplace pressures, challenges such as managerialism, increased workload, and inequalities have worsened, significantly impacting mental health. This paper presents a conceptual analysis connecting EDI with organizational compassion within the context of Higher Education. The prioritization of organizational compassion is presented as a means to enhance sensitivity to EDI in the reconstruction of post-pandemic learning environments. Anchored in the organizational compassion theory and the NEAR Mechanisms Model, our study contributes to the intersection of the organizational compassion, EDI and higher education literatures by exploring how fostering compassion relations can contribute to enhancing EDI. This offers a new perspective to creating a more humane and supportive higher education environment.

Organizational compassion and employee adversarial growth under various job control.

Adversity can bring stress and challenges to an individual's life, but many people who experience adversity also have positive changes. The formative mechanisms of individual adversarial growth have received widespread attention. A two-wave survey of 421 Chinese employees who experienced adversity during the COVID-19 epidemic was used to examine the influence mechanism of organizational compassion on adversarial growth and the moderating effect of job control. Through correlation analysis, hierarchical regression, and bootstrap test on the cross-sectional data, the study has verified organizational compassion, work passion, self-worth, and adversarial growth form a chain mediating relation. Job control negatively moderates the indirect effect of organizational compassion on adversarial growth through work passion and self-worth, that is, the positive effect of organizational compassion on employee adversarial growth through work passion and self-worth is more pronounced under lower job control. Organizational compassion can increase employee adversarial growth by enhancing their work passion and self-worth. Organizations should also pay more attention to those employees with lower job control who are in adversity, they are more likely to benefit from the organization's care and compassion.

Providing a voice to the experience of bereavement support at Mexican workplaces

Literature on grief in the workplace is mainly represented in the last three decades and is predominantly western focused. An interpretative phenomenological research study was conducted using criterion sampling to recruit nine participants working full time in Mexican organizations who had a death loss of a close family member in 2018, 2019, 2020, or the first six months of 2021. Participants were interviewed to explore the types of practices offered from their workplace and the implications of those practices, and the felt experience as they made meaning through narrative and visual representation. Results revealed inconsistencies in organizations related to bereavement practices, such as organizations inconsistent communication of bereavement, providing time off, providing flexible bereavement support, and providing financial support for employees exists in the Mexican workplace. The implications of such practices were those of lack of organizational compassion, and insufficient flexibility around work expectations, financial support, and psychological support.

Uncovering paradoxes of compassion at work: a dyadic study of compassionate leader behavior.

In today's business world, organizations tend to overlook that employees face suffering caused by work and non-work-related events that can negatively impact business organizations in the long run. One way to address this challenge is through leadership acknowledging and alleviating employees' suffering to ensure a company's success. However, research on compassion and leadership in business settings is still relatively scarce. In this study, we aim to extend the organizational compassion literature by addressing our research question: "What are paradoxes induced by compassionate leader behavior in the workplace in the context of social hierarchy?". We conducted a qualitative exploratory study based on 12 semi-structured interviews with six dyads of leaders and their direct subordinates from small, medium, and large firms representing different industries. The findings of our study indicate that compassionate leader behavior goes hand-in-hand with paradoxical situations that both leader and member face in the workplace, supporting the proposition that compassion as a social, interpersonal process is complex and multi-faceted. Our analysis identified 6 compassion paradoxes that spring from compassion from a leader towards a member. Our study differentiates from other research of compassion paradoxes in the sense that it also focuses on the interplay between leader and member. From that perspective, the findings of our study indicate that social hierarchy is playing a crucial role and exacerbating some paradoxical tensions. This consideration implies that to be effective, compassionate leaders need to have or develop the ability to continuously transcend those compassion paradoxes, as well as support their members in transcending the paradoxes they find themselves dealing with. Thus, the findings of our study contribute to management literature in the field of Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS) by highlighting compassion as a critical element of dyadic leader-subordinate relationships that could be reinforced by systematically building more competence in leaders and members to navigate the tensions emerging from the identified compassion paradoxes. Additionally, we provide limitations and recommendations for further research, along with several theoretical and practical implications of the results, which are particularly relevant for practitioners such as managing directors, leaders, employees, human resource managers, academics, and business and HR consultants.

Compassion in Organizations: A New Perspective for Maintaining Diversity Management

Compassion in Organizations: A New Perspective for Maintaining Diversity Management

Communicating compassion in organizations: a conceptual review

This article explores the theoretical terrain surrounding compassion in organizational settings to clarify how conceptually (dis)similar concepts like social support, team care, and organizational compassion manifest different agentic perspectives on compassion. Toward this end, we articulate a working definition of compassion and suggest that a communicative frame focused on intersubjective sense-making and interpretation can deepen our understanding of who is responsible for care and compassion within organizations. Existing research on this subject considers who or what provides compassion—individuals, teams, policies—and how compassion can assuage suffering and promote individual and organizational flourishing. Extending this work, we document core dimensions of each form of compassion for greater conceptual clarity and precision, proposing a metaphor for each. Finally, we reflect on the implications of each type of compassion for resilience and the ways current notions of compassion typify the rationality/emotionality duality and gendered nature of emotion work in organizations.

"Get on with it. Cope." The compassion-experience during COVID-19 in UK universities.

The COVID-19 pandemic caused major disruption to all sectors including higher education during the years of 2020 and 2021, thus providing a window into how different types of suffering can combine and the role of compassion in alleviating pain. Higher education within the United Kingdom provides a case example in this study, but the lessons about compassion are transferable to other contexts, particularly those in the neoliberal public sector. The impact of the pandemic period on teaching in universities has been well documented but there has been far less written about the wider experiences of staff who worked through this period, their suffering and the extent of compassion within their work lives. 29 interviews were conducted and individuals were invited to talk through the story of their pandemic experiences from March 2020 to the interview date of December 2021. Storytelling is a common method in organization studies and, although research into compassion in organizations is nascent, this method has been used in other studies. Previous research has examined organizational compassion in short periods of crisis and this study therefore provides a contrasting perspective on how compassion shifts over a longer period of suffering. A distinction is drawn in this study for the first time between "formalized" compassion processes in the organization which structurally prioritized compassion for students over that of staff, and "informal" compassion shown between staff to each other and between students and staff. The more that formalized compassion was evident, the less apparent it was in interpersonal interactions due to staff wellbeing being compromised and a systemic failure to recognize the dependence of student compassion on the wellbeing of staff. The findings therefore lead to theorizing that although neoliberal universities are perceived as being full of organizational neglect, compassion was structurally embedded for students but at the expense of staff.

The development and validation of multidimensional workplace compassion scale: Linking its conceptualization and measurement.

Organizational compassion is a powerful force that possesses the capability to move individuals and groups towards a common good. Research on organizational compassion or compassion in the workplace has discussed its potential to reduce individual suffering and enhance positive emotions, wellbeing, and dignity. The existing literature lacks a valid and reliable measure of workplace compassion that follows the recent conceptualization of organizational compassion. This research presents the development and validation of workplace compassion scale. The scale development process consisted of four studies with a total sample of 947 respondents. In study 1, we developed the items for the new measure, by considering the four-factor conceptualization of organizational compassion. Study 2 and 3 focuses on item purification and testing the model fit indices of the proposed scale. In study 4, we followed a time separated design to test the nomological network and discriminant validity of the workplace compassion scale. The final workplace compassion scale consists of 12 items that measure other-oriented/expressed compassion in the workplace. The scale is beneficial for providing impetus to future quantitative research in organizational compassion.

Beyond burnout: Collective suffering and organizational compassion.

Beyond burnout: Collective suffering and organizational compassion.

Bridgework: A Model of Brokering Relationships Across Social Boundaries in Organizations

Relationships are central to organizing, work, and organizations. Yet, in many instances, relationships do not build themselves, and third-party actors are often needed to intervene in situations, persuade individuals, and facilitate connections across disconnected actors in organizations. Little is known about the strategies through which third-party actors can broker relationships across what are considered to be intractable social boundaries—membership in stigmatized or nonstigmatized social identity-based groups. We build a process theory of what we call “bridgework,” the strategy used by third-party agents, intermediaries, and allies to bridge by shifting value-related perceptions about actors on the other side of social identity-based divides. More specifically, we focus on a stigmatizing social identity that can create boundaries that are often reinforced through informal network ties. Based on interviews, participatory observation, and archival data with job coaches for adults with autism spectrum disorders and related developmental disabilities, we showcase a model of bridgework—a combination of internal and external strategies across three stages (adding, stabilizing, and maintaining perceptions of value) to facilitate relationships between stigmatized and nonstigmatized members of organizations. We discuss how our grounded model contributes to the rich traditions of research on stigma, brokerage, disability studies, positive relationships, and compassion in organizations. Funding: This project was supported by a Smeal Small Research Grant in Spring 2015.

Compassion and altruism in organizations: a path for firm survival

PurposeThe authors draw on this approach to explore the consequences of compassion and altruism in the workplace for firm performance, using organizational resilience as a mediating variable.Design/methodology/approachIn recent years, a paradigm shift has been proposed in the organizational sciences that includes a change from self-centeredness to interconnectedness. This emergent management paradigm considers that employees are not only motivated by self-interest but also by other-centered values, such as altruism and compassion for others. This alternative proposal suggests the need for a more humanistic perspective for management. To carry out the research, the authors applied a structural equation model to a sample of highly innovative companies from different sectors.FindingsThe results confirm that compassion at work leads to a climate based on altruism, which indirectly increases firm performance by means of organizational resilience. This study contributes to the organizational literature by revealing some benefits of promoting altruism and compassion in organizations.Originality/valueThis study therefore provides a detailed analysis of the consequences of altruism and compassion in organizations and reveals some organizational conditions that can drive firm performance. Moreover, this study is the first to suggest and empirically validate that a work climate based on altruism enhances organizational resilience. In turn, organizational resilience enables the firm to take appropriate actions to convert unexpected and adverse situations that potentially threaten its survival into sources of opportunity and growth.

Organizational Compassion: Ameliorating Healthcare Workers' Suffering and Burnout

Organizational Compassion: Ameliorating Healthcare Workers' Suffering and Burnout