The Compassionate Instinct

Over the last six years, Dutton and her colleagues have studied an array of organizational settings, including hospitals, universities, and businesses like Newsweek, Reuters, Macy’s, and Cisco Systems, using a combination of surveys, structured interviews, and observation to learn how organizations respond to employees experiencing personal difficulty. Their studies yielded some stories of compassion, where distressed workers received cards, flowers, financial help, emotional support, or time off from work; in other cases, workers complained of receiving little sympathy or help. “We found that employees who’d experienced compassion at work saw themselves, their coworkers, and the organization in a more positive light,” said Dutton. “Statistically, they demonstrated more positive emotions, such as joy and contentment, and more commitment toward the organization.” Interestingly, she added, these results held regardless of whether employees received compassion directly or merely witnessed it.

Dutton sees compassion as a natural response of people witnessing others in pain or distress—something we are hardwired to do. The problem with bringing compassion into the workplace, she explains, is that people don’t know what’s acceptable to express in that setting. Many workers assume that they are supposed to check their personal problems at the door when they enter the office. “Ever since organizations began moving toward more bureaucracy and measuring success by reliability and efficiency, the relational aspects of work have been de-emphasized,” said Dutton. But when stress at home inevitably spills into the workplace, Dutton added, it can contribute to lost productivity and higher health care costs, and compassion becomes a vital response. “If compassion heals, as our research suggests, then people will be able to get back to work more quickly, to bounce back from life’s setbacks,” she said. “This has to be of interest to employers.”

Thomas Wright, a researcher in the University of Nevada’s managerial sciences department, agrees that managers would do well to pay more attention to the mental health of their employees. In several studies, Wright has found that psychological well-being accounted for 10 to 25 percent of an employee’s job performance and was predictive of positive employee evaluations up to five years in the future. “Organizations that are able and willing to foster a psychologically well workforce and work environment are at a distinct competitive advantage,” said Wright. “Managers should take note.”

Apparently, some are. At Cisco Systems, a California company that creates technologies for the Internet, whenever an employee suffered a significant loss, such as a death in the family, CEO John Chambers made it a policy to contact that employee within 48 hours to offer his condolences and help. His example gave others within the organization a green light to act compassionately toward their coworkers, and employees consistently rate the company as one of the best places to work in the country. “When an organization’s capacity for compassion comes from the top, it can result in a kind of compassion contagion that sweeps the whole organization,” said Dutton.

Of course, not all organizations have charismatic leaders to serve as compassionate role models, but that’s not necessarily an obstacle to building a compassionate workplace. According to Monica Worline, a professor of organization and management at Emory University and a POS scholar, overt displays of compassion usually come from coworkers, not management. But through in-depth case studies of several organizations, she has found that organizations that implicitly encourage positive contact among employees, through regular meetings or by providing spaces for employees to gather together informally tend to have higher levels of compassion. Frequent interaction gives workers more opportunities to notice when someone needs help and to offer it; when workers share news and ideas, it helps foster empathy between them. “An organization which has high-quality connections between people will have much more fertile ground for compassion to happen,” said Worline.