ABSTRACT
We view compassion in organizations as a phenomenon through which not only the upper managers can see an effective path for corporate healing and renewal, but other organizational actors can see sustainable paths for making their job sites better places to work. Organizational researchers often accept the traditional Western understandings of compassion and its manifestations by conceptualizing compassion at work as a process of noticing someone’s suffering and then empathizing with it and acting to alleviate it (Kanov et al., 2004). Rynes, Bartunek, Dutton, and Margolis (2012) recently challenged us to not only deepen our understanding of compassion as traditionally viewed but also to elevate our treatment of it to the level of “a natural and living representation of people’s humanity in the workplace” (Frost, Dutton, Worline, & Wilson, 2000, p. 25). Preceding that call, we entrusted executives (i.e., experienced upper managers and organizational expert leaders) to provide their accounts of compassion at work as a foundation for new theory. Our first step-prompted by the urgency of perilous economic times-was to inform the scholarly understanding of compassion in organizations with that of the executives. Our curiosity was plain: if compassion is natural and generally desired, then how is it construed (i.e., viewed and interpreted from experience) by organizational executives in the contexts of their work? What was not plain was the set of findings that contribute to management literature by revealing two distinct ways of compassion construal and the possibility of such construal from organizational situations that lack an apparent suffering. This study also contributes a perspective on compassion construal through the lenses of attribution, psychological experience, and intervention, and it adds further value by illuminating some executives’ beneficial efforts in their work as compassionate solution designers.
