Mediating positive moods: the impact of experiencing compassion at work

Abstract

It is importance to cultivate a compassionate and caring culture throughout hospitals' hierarchies, especially from the top down. Nurses will have more opportunities to experience it, witness it, or participate in it when they work within a compassionate and caring organisational culture.

Impact of Providing Compassion on Job Performance and Mental Health: The Moderating Effect of Interpersonal Relationship Quality

“…A higher score denotes the ability to provide a relatively high amount of compassion to others. Evidence of criterion validity was collected from a sample of 269 registered nurses employed by hospitals in Taiwan (Chu, ). Cronbach's α values for Chu's () study and the current study were .86 and .90, respectively.…”

“…When people provide compassion, the emotions they feel in their relationships with others are enhanced, resulting in positive emotions (Dutton, ). People with highly positive mood states exhibit improved job performance compared with those without highly positive mood states (Chu, ).…”

“…Although some studies have observed negative impacts of compassion such as compassion distress and compassion fatigue on nurses (Figley, ; Sabo, ), an increasing number of studies have emphasized that compassion at work is associated with numerous crucial positive outcomes for employees and organizations (Chu, ; Grant, Dutton, & Rosso, ; Lilius et al., ). Lilius et al.…”

“…() revealed that the act of providing compassion can strengthen employees’ affective commitments to their organization by reinforcing their prosocial identities as caring individuals as well as the identity of the organization as caring. Chu () also determined that hospital nurses receiving more compassion at work tend to have more positive moods and are therefore likely to perform more effectively and to engage in more organizational citizenship behaviors.…”

Prosocial Behavior at Work Through the Lens of Character Strengths

“…Compassion, from an organizational perspective, involves noticing another's suffering, empathetically feeling another's pain and acting in a way that will ease the suffering (Lilius et al, 2008). The experience of compassion and caring generates positive outcomes at work, such as greater voluntary helping through the increase of positive emotions and mood (Lilius et al, 2008;Chu, 2016). That being said, attention should be paid to not exhibit the underuse of kindness -indifference, or its overuse -intrusiveness (Niemiec, 2014;Freidlin et al, 2017).…”