Editorial: Compassion: From Neuroscience to New Horizons and Innovative, Inclusive Research Agendas

This research topic issue follows on from ‘Expanding the Science of Compassion’ (Mongrain, Keltner and Kirby, 2021), which explored the neuroscience, physiological, psychological, and environmental aspects of the experience of compassion. This issue extends the understanding of compassion to include compassion in health psychology, pedagogical practice in higher education, organizations and leadership. It introduces innovative approaches from scholars working in diverse research contexts that include South Africa, Sri Lanka, and Slovenia, and highlights new horizons for organizational neuroscience research

Re -envisioning feeling and relating at work: An inductive study of interpersonal disconnection in organizational life.

This inductive study aims to explore the nature and significance of interpersonal disconnection in work organizations. Drawing on a relational theory of psychological development (Miller & Stiver, 1997) and a theory of social life (Sandelands, 2003), interpersonal disconnection is conceptualized as a visceral relational phenomenon---a social dynamic that involves the mutual creation of distance between people and that is evocative of a variety of painful and disruptive feelings. Data was collected through field observations and open-ended qualitative interviews at an information technology organization. Forty-eight storied accounts of individuals' experiences of interpersonal disconnection collected via the interviews were analyzed to explore what such experiences feel like, what the social dynamics of such experiences are like, and how instances of interpersonal disconnection impact organizational life. Data reveal that interpersonal disconnection punctuates and permanently alters the social life of relationships. It unfolds as a mutually distancing dynamic such that the individuals involved move together to increase the relational distance between them in their relationship. This increase intensifies the inherent tension of the relationship and thus evokes a variety of feelings (e.g., separation, anxiety, and enervation). Individuals' attempts to move beyond the pain and disruption of these feelings set the relationship on one of three trajectories. Each trajectory is marked by a unique social dynamic: reconnection involves a mutual bridging of the relational distance created during the initial instance of interpersonal disconnection; stasis involves mutual adaptation to the relational distance; and distance creation involves further mutual distancing. This research contributes to ongoing conversations in the organizational literature by revealing that interpersonal disconnection is not something that happens, but rather it is something that people do. It is a dynamic visceral social process that triggers other dynamic social processes, all of which permanently alter organizations' daily social fabric. This perspective enhances our understanding of how seemingly mundane interpersonal happenings not only take an emotional and psychological toll on individuals, but also how they come to have far-reaching and enduring effects on relationships and on organizational life more generally.Ph.D.ManagementOccupational psychologyPsychologySocial SciencesUniversity of Michigan, Horace H. Rackham School of Graduate Studieshttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/125396/2/3192671.pd

Is it ok to care? How compassion falters and is courageously accomplished in the midst of uncertainty

This article elaborates the organizational literature’s process theory of compassion – an empathic response to suffering – which falls short of adequately explaining why and how compassion unfolds readily in some workplace situations or settings but not in others. We address this shortcoming by calling attention to the basic uncertainty of suffering and compassion, demonstrating that this uncertainty tends to be particularly pronounced in organizational settings, and presenting propositions that explain how such uncertainty inhibits the compassion process. We then argue that understanding the accomplishment of compassion in the midst of uncertainty necessitates regarding compassion as an enactment of courage, and we incorporate insights from the organizational literature on everyday courageous action into compassion theory. We conclude with a discussion of implications in which we underscore the importance of organizational support for the expression of suffering and the doing of compassion, and we also consider directions for future research

Understanding compassion capability

We elaborate a theory of the foundations of a collective capability for compassion through a detailed analysis of everyday practices in an organizational unit. Our induced theory of compassion capability draws on the findings of an interview study to illustrate and explain how a specific set of everyday practices creates two relational conditions — high quality connections and a norm of dynamic boundary permeability — that enable employees of a collective unit to notice, feel and respond to members’ suffering. By articulating the mechanisms that connect everyday practices and a work unit’s compassion capability, we provide insight into the relational micro-foundations of a capability grounded in individual action and interaction

Compassion revealed: What we know about compassion at work (and where we need to know more)

In this chapter, we examine work by those who have responded to Frost’s (1999) call for research that accounts for suffering and compassion in work organizations. We add to this line of inquiry by reviewing the organizational research on compassion published over the past decade and illuminating connections with extant research on related phenomena. In particular, we explore current understandings of the nature and impact of compassion at work, the conditions that facilitate compassion in work organizations, and efforts to institutionalize compassion. In pointing to what we see as fruitful directions for future research, we invite more scholars to see suffering and compassion as critical and pervasive aspects of organizational life

Compassion in organizational life

In this article, the authors explore compassion in work organizations. They discuss the prevalence and costs of pain in organizational life, and identify compassion as an important process that can occur in response to suffering. At the individual level, compassion takes place through three subprocesses: noticing another’s pain, experiencing an emotional reaction to the pain, and acting in response to the pain. The authors build on this framework to argue that organizational compassion exists when members of a system collectively notice, feel, and respond to pain experienced by members of that system. These processes become collective as features of an organization’s context legitimate them within the organization, propagate them among organizational members, and coordinate them across individuals