Compassion

Abstract

Compassion, an empathic dynamic response to suffering, is associated with kindness, care and support and provides key resources which facilitate connectedness, recovery and healing. Aligned with positive organizational scholarship, compassion at work promotes socially sustainable workforce management and results in employee thriving and organizational flourishing. As a relational phenomenon, workplace compassion could occur at the interpersonal or organizational level. Interpersonal compassion is contingent on individual initiative and subject to individual discretion and idiosyncrasy. Organizational compassion is systemic and institutionalized in organizational structure, culture and processes and hence occurs as a taken-for-granted routine activity. Workplace compassion holds positive consequences for recipients, givers, witnesses and organizations, reducing the costs of suffering while simultaneously entailing its own costs. Being an emergent area in organizational studies, research into compassion’s perceived gendered nature, link with power and political behaviour, financial implications, inclusive or exclusive application and cross-cultural dynamics is warranted.