The influence of mindfulness and moral disengagement on the psychological health and willingness to work of civil servants experiencing compassion fatigue

Abstract

Both public administration scholars and practitioners believe that "good governance" relies on the involvement of compassionate officials. However, they overlook the fact that "compassion fatigue" often occurs when officials face the dual pressure arising from superiors' orders and empathy for service receivers. This would inevitably not only affect their individual behaviors, but also influence the effectiveness of their service. A full-scale investigation of animal protection administrators in Taiwan was conducted so as to analyze compassion fatigue that civil servants would encounter and further establish a relationship between various variables and the hypotheses of this study by combining the studies of public administration and psychology. It should be noted that compassion fatigue may affect animal protection administrators' mental health in spite of little influence on their willingness to work hard. However, both "mindfulness" and "moral disengagement" are coping strategies which were developed for helping tackle the dilemma of compassion fatigue. Although applying the strategy of mindfulness can generate more positive impacts on individuals and organizations than that of moral disengagement, animal protection administrators tended to adopt the latter. Accordingly, encouraging animal protection administrators to adopt mindfulness instead of moral disengagement as their coping strategy will be a priority of work for the authorities in the future.

Ethical human resource management mitigates the positive association between illegitimate tasks and employee unethical behaviour

“…It is thus highly advantageous for use in field research. A number of scholars have used this scale to assess individuals’ psychological states in the context of the workplace (Shaw et al., 2020; Welsh et al., 2020; Wu, 2020); as such, we also used this scale. Eight items were measured on a seven‐point Likert scale ranging from strongly disagree to strongly agree.…”

“…However, people do not ordinarily engage in reprehensible conduct until they have justified to themselves the morality of their actions through cognitive reconstrual (Bandura, 1991a). Moral disengagement can explain the above mechanism, which was previously conceptualised as a trait (i.e., a dispositional propensity to morally disengage), but has recently begun to be treated by scholars as a state (Hystad et al., 2014; Shaw et al., 2020; Welsh et al., 2020; Wu, 2020). As noted by Moore (2015, p. 202), moral disengagement can also operate as “a state triggered by more immediate contextual factors”.…”

All Creatures Great and Small: A Review and Typology of Employee-Animal Interactions

“…2 Much of the literature has been concerned with profiling the type of employee drawn to such work. Perhaps not surprisingly, persistent predictors include a dispositional affinity for animals (Amiot & Bastian, 2015;Levitt & Gezinski, 2020), a desire to improve the lives of animals (Black, Winefield, & Chur-Hansen, 2011;Jarvis et al, 2019;Wu, 2022), intrinsic personal investment and passion for animals (Jarvis et al, 2019), and feelings of love, respect, and empathy for animals (Levitt & Gezinski, 2020).…”

“…As a consequence of difficult working conditions and unmet expectations, the work can manifest in guilt, grief, and anger (Anderson, Brandt, Lord, & Miles, 2013;Andrukonis & Protopopova, 2020;Whipple, 2021). Animal shelter workers (Anderson et al, 2013) veterinarians (White, Yeung, Chilvers, & O'Donoghue, 2021), and animal protection administrators (Wu, 2022) report emotional distress when caring for sick, injured, and dying animals. The aforementioned caring-killing paradox tends to take an emotional toll and create a sense of moral conflict (Hannah & Robertson, 2021;McLoughlin, 2019).…”

“…Throughout our review, we found that these various emotions necessitate emotional labor and coping as well as self-and other-regulation. Functional efforts include physical separation and cognitive detachment from emotionally taxing work (Hannah & Robertson, 2021), building supportive communities of practice (Schabram & Maitlis, 2017), and mindfulness practices (Wu, 2022). Unhealthy approaches are also common and may include alcohol and drug consumption (Baran et al, 2016) and self-sacrificial impulses (Jacobs & Reese, 2021).…”