Compassion in Organizational Life

Abstract

In this article, the authors explore compassion in work organizations. They discuss the prevalence and costs of pain in organizational life, and identify compassion as an important process that can occur in response to suffering. At the individual level, compassion takes place through three subprocesses: noticing another’s pain, experiencing an emotional reaction to the pain, and acting in response to the pain. The authors build on this framework to argue that organizational compassion exists when members of a system collectively notice, feel, and respond to pain experienced by members of that system. These processes become collective as features of an organization’s context legitimate them within the organization, propagate them among organizational members, and coordinate them across individuals.

A Theory of Collective Empathy in Corporate Philanthropy Decisions

“…Empathy is an otheroriented emotional response elicited by and congruent with the perceived welfare of a person in need, forming a potent source of motivation to help relieve the empathy-inducing need (Batson, Eklund, Chermok, Hoyt, & Ortiz, 2007;Kanov, Maitlis, Worline, Dutton, Frost, & Lilius, 2004). The other-directed reparative action tendencies associated with empathy stem from appraisals of how others are affected by their plight (Gault & Sabini, 2000;Oveis, Horberg, & Keltner, 2010).…”

Entrepreneurial Cognition

“…Social support often results in enhanced well-being, and firms are in the position to create spaces for compassion being received and given (Kanov et al 2004). This compassion can include empathetic listening to other organizational members' problems (Frost 2003), sympathetic emotions (Carlo et al 1999), and executing large-scale reactions to unanticipated traumatic events (Dutton et al 2006).…”

“…This compassion can include empathetic listening to other organizational members' problems (Frost 2003), sympathetic emotions (Carlo et al 1999), and executing large-scale reactions to unanticipated traumatic events (Dutton et al 2006). Mostly seen as an important and positive force in firms (Kanov et al 2004), scholars have explored compassion at numerous levels of analysis; these levels include individuals' compassion for others (Nussbaum 1996), compassion as an interpersonal, people-connecting process (Kanov et al 2004), and the ways people unite to deliver an organized compassionate organizational response (e.g., compassion organizing (Dutton et al 2006) and compassion venturing Williams and Shepherd 2016)). Compassion is the manifestation of the instinctive human need to respond to others' suffering in order to ease that suffering.…”

“…Employees who are self-compassionate are moved by their own negative emotions over project failure, are mindful of their discomfort, and want to ease this suffering by healing themselves instead of avoiding or detaching from the negative emotions' origin (Neff 2003a;Wispe 1991). Unlike other-directed compassion, the relational process of self-compassion (Kanov et al 2004) happens through the relationships people have with themselves.…”

Multiple Facets of Compassion: The Impact of Social Dominance Orientation and Economic Systems Justification

“…At least three elements of compassion have been established: noticing another's suffering, empathically feeling the person's pain, and acting to ease the suffering (Dutton et al 2006;Kanov et al 2004). Importantly, compassion goes past empathy to actual helping behavior, whether or not the action achieves the goal of ameliorating suffering (Kanov et al 2004;Reich 1989). The impact of not being compassionate is becoming clear in the management literature.…”