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Background: Not all emotional support messages consist purely of positive statements. Some emotional support messages received by cancer patients simultaneously communicate statements of caring but also negative statements, such as criticisms of patients’ actions. Objective: This study tests if a negative statement occurring within an emotional support message affects cancer patients’ perceptions of the effectiveness of the entire emotional support message as well as the perceived competence of the supporter communicating the emotional support message. Methods: Cancer patients watched video recordings of emotional support messages and subsequently provided ratings on message effectiveness and supporter competence. Some emotional support messages included negative statements, whereas other messages did not. Results: Messages that included a negative statement were rated lower on message effectiveness than messages without negative statements. Cancer patients rated supporters communicating messages with a negative statement as having significantly less competence than those who did not communicate a negative statement. Conclusion: A single negative statement occurring within an emotional support message may result in cancer patients viewing the emotional support as less effective and the supporter as less competent.

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Employee and organizational sustainability are threatened by widespread stress, burnout, and mental health challenges, among other life events. Compassion at work may create more sustainable organizations by alleviating this suffering, but scholars remain puzzled as to why compassion often fails to unfold within organizations. One potential explanation is that suffering employees feel uncertain in expressing suffering at work. To date, however, relatively little research has examined the perspective of suffering employees and the potential hesitation to express suffering due to organizational norms, power dynamics with leaders, and other influences. This study seeks to expand our understanding of compassion by examining how suffering employees make sense of compassionate interactions with leaders, and the concerns they have disclosing and discussing suffering at work. Utilizing qualitative, semi-structured interviews, we found that suffering employees have four driving concerns, which constrain the discussion of suffering at work: (1) professionalism and the appropriateness of suffering, (2) the validity of one’s suffering, (3) the collective impact of a compassionate response, and (4) image management. These concerns, while at times isolated, were often layered for employees in ways that compounded the challenge of disclosing suffering and openly engaging with leaders across the compassion process. We analyze these driving concerns, linking them to prior research and illustrating how these concerns limit employees  ability to receive compassion and, in some cases, exacerbate their suffering. Practical implications are discussed as well, outlining ways that organizations can shape compassion processes toward greater employee sustainability.