Managing compassionately? Managerial narratives about grief and compassion

Abstract

How do you manage a team following the death of an employee? This article explores this question and inquires if managerial responses to suffering can be compassionate with a decentralized team structure, in the restaurant industry where employees are faced with a high degree of emotional labour. To date, the compassion process has suggested that a focal actor, often a manager, first must notice suffering, then must feel empathic concern, and act in ways to alleviate a sufferer’s pain (Kanov et al., 2004). In this study, against the backdrop of the compassion process with a narrative approach and stories-as-text design, the findings articulate the material conditions that impede, disavow and inhibit the compassion process from the point of view of three restaurant managers acting as focal actors and their (rather unsuccessful) attempts to aid and alleviate the suffering of their grieving team members. By explicating the dynamics of their managerial failure using the link of grief and compassion, this article extends our understanding of grief at work and management in the restaurant industry more broadly.

Making sense of organisational change failure: An identity lens

“…We also conceptualised narratives as ‘sponsored texts’ (Harris, 1989), wherein individuals use narratives to: (a) make sense of experiences; (b) position themselves within the phenomena; and (c) assign judgements ‘as to what may be regarded as good or bad, right or wrong, including basic beliefs and values’ (Peticca-Harris, 2019: 594). This emergence of often-conflicting narratives about the same events captured our interest.…”

“…While organisational change involves considerable ambiguity and uncertainty for employees (Bordia et al, 2004), we expect organisational change failure to be particularly confronting for employees due to its inherent negativity and permanence. If judgements of organisational change failure represent a perceived deviation from the goals of change (as per Cannon and Edmondson, 2001), perceiving failure is likely to be challenging to the specific interpretive frame from which these subjective goals were generated, such as employees’ values (Peticca-Harris, 2019). As such, the effects of organisational change failure on employees may be profound, substantially unsettling their sense of self-at-work, as well as influencing their affect, cognition, and behaviour at work more broadly – all depending on exactly how they perceive the change as a failure, and why (as we discuss later).…”

“…This may exacerbate the failure of the change, or even create change failure where it may not have existed otherwise – all of which may potentially occur alongside change agents who purport the success of the change (i.e. change is multi-vocal (Peticca-Harris, 2019)).…”

Theorizing dramaturgical resistance leadership from the leadership campaigns of Jeremy Corbyn

“…Our analysis focused on identifying narrative components that constituted the ‘composite narrative’ (Maitlis, 2012: 495) of what we title dramaturgical resistance leadership. In so doing, we sought to ‘discern a plot that unites and gives meaning to the fragmented elements in the interview material’ (Peticca-Harris, 2019: 596). Our underlying logic was abductive (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2007; Cunliffe and Eriksen, 2011), as we tried not to escape our previous knowledge but rather to discover mysteries (Alvesson and Kärreman, 2007) that forced us to rethink our views.…”

“…Our intent was to generate not an impartial account of the past, but to surface clues as to the purpose and ethos participants attributed to leadership. By treating interviews as sensemaking forums we hoped to surface collective norms, ‘judgements as to what may be regarded as good or bad, right or wrong, including basic beliefs and values’ (Peticca-Harris, 2019: 594). Important in this process of sensemaking was our reflexive awareness of the identity and role of the interviewer – who had a history of 19 years as a party member and seven as a party employee, and who had shared some experiences with seven of the participants – in co-constructing the meanings of narratives (Ylijoki, 2005).…”