Abstract:

Compassion is a process through which individuals notice others’ sufferings, evaluate the current situation, feel others’ sufferings and eventually take actions to help them out of trouble. Compassion has received much attention in research on positive organizational scholarship. Behavior coding, questionnaire, self-report and qualitative evaluation have been used to measure compassion in organization. A set of predictors, including relationship quality between organization members, organizational culture, leadership and institutionalized compassion practices, have shown to be positively related to compassion, which in turn facilitates positive emotion, anxiety, job satisfaction, organizational commitment, OCB, turnover intention, and cooperative capability. Future studies should further examine the structure and measurement of compassion in organization, antecedents and more nuanced mechanisms.

Key words: compassion in organization, empathy, sympathy, pity