Augmenting the Limitations of Organizational Compassion with Wisdom and Power: Insights from Bhutan

Compassionate organizational practices emphasizing human dignity and wellbeing within the workplace have been identified as underpinning a great number of organizational benefits. These include enhanced employee engagement, commitment, loyalty, trust and productivity, along with reduced absenteeism and turnover. Drawing upon insights on administrative compassion in Bhutan, I suggest that it is a folly to single out compassion on its own as the source of positive organizational outcomes. I argue that additional qualities of phronesis or wisdom and understanding of the workings of power are equally crucial. Indeed, without these additional attributes, compassion can be sentimental and misguided, indicating a lack of judgment that increases suffering

Organizational compassion as a complex social relational process

University of Technology, Sydney. Faculty of Business.The past two decades have seen a growing acknowledgement of the significant role played by emotion in organizations, with a consequent emergence of interest in organizational compassion. The most in-depth body of research on organizational compassion has been conducted by academics associated with the fledgling Positive Organizational Scholarship community. While this literature has spurred scholarly theorising and research of compassion, a gap in this literature is its under-acknowledgement of compassion as a complex social relational process enmeshed in power dynamics. A related limitation is the lack of appropriate acknowledgement that as a social phenomenon, the outcomes of compassion relations are a mix of positivity and negativity. To the contrary, much of the literature assumes compassion to be an inherent psychological trait, or an eternal moral imperative, that leads to positive individual and collective outcomes. I have sought to demonstrate through theoretical and empirical research that organizational compassion relations are inseparable from social relations of power. The findings of these studies have been written up as five articles submitted to organization and management journals and then collected together for submission as a dissertation by publication. Two articles are theoretical, while three present the findings of empirical research using narrative and discursive methodologies. Narrative methods were used in two studies to analyse the same interview data collected from 25 employees from 18 organizations. The interviews concerned the support provided to them (or the lack of support) when the Brisbane CBD was evacuated in January 2011 due to the flooding of the Brisbane River. The fact that the interviewees were from different organizations allowed comparison of narratives from different organizational settings, during a time of crisis that affected the entire community. Cross comparison of these narratives provided an opportunity for deeper insight into the power dynamics of organizational compassion, in both structural and practical aspects. In a further study, discursive analysis was applied to naturalistic data available through 278 user comments from two online news articles. The unsolicited user comments from each case provided divergent arguments indicating that legitimacy as a giver or receiver of compassion is highly contested and is embedded within power considerations of privilege, obligation, control, and exploitation. The overall contribution of this thesis is to provide theoretical frameworks as well as empirical observations analysing the variables that contribute to the social construction of organizations deemed more or less compassionate and, in so doing, providing an empirically supported sociological definition of organizational compassion

What is the best treatment for Nancy in Aotearoa, New Zealand?

Depression is an increasing problem affecting New Zealand society with enormous social costs. Determining the best form of treatment for depressive symptoms is a complex issue located in an ongoing professional debate. This article asks what is best treatment for a hypothetical patient, Nancy residing in Aotearoa. It considers how we might know what is best for the patient. The medical model, with its disease perspective , sees cure in specific ingredients. Within this model Randomised Clinical Trials (RCTs) are viewed as the best research method to determine the mos t effective therapy modality. RCTs however do not establish effectiveness in the practice setting. Within the bicultural New Zealand context this suggests that our patient may not be helped by a practitioner following an intervention recommended by the findings of RCTs. The contextual model views the effectiveness of psychotherapy as related to the context of the psychotherapy process regardless of the modality used. A related research methodology is single participant case studies. It is suggested that recording and aggregating the findings of single participant-case studies might produce more realistic data , generalisable to both New Zealand's Pakeha and Maori populations

Compassion, power and organization

In this paper, we analyse the significance of compassion as an emotion in its relationship to various manifestations of power within the organisational context. We critique those theories of compassion that assume that compassion in organsational contexts is motivated only by a noble intent. The paper draws on a study of organisational responses to the flood that devastated the City of Brisbane Australia on the morning of 11 January 2011. We use a framework of 'circuits of power' to provide a triple focus on interpersonal, organisational and societal uses of power together with a model of coercive, instrumental and normative organisational power. We present our findings in a framework constructed by overlapping these frameworks. The unique contribution of this paper is to provide a conceptualisation of organisational compassion enmeshed with various modes of power exercised in and by organisations. © 2013 © 2013 Taylor & Francis

Compassion Power and Organization

In this paper we analyse the significance of compassion as an emotion in its relationship to various manifestations of power within the organizational context. We critique those theories of compassion that assume that compassion in organizational contexts is motivated only by a noble intent. The paper draws on a study of organizational responses to the flood that devastated the City of Brisbane Australia on the morning of January 11, 2011. We use Clegg’s (1989) research framework of ‘circuits of power’ to provide a triple focus on interpersonal, organizational and societal uses of power together with Etzioni’s (1961) model of coercive, instrumental and normative organizational power. We present our findings in a framework constructed by overlapping Clegg (1989) and Etzioni’s (1961) frameworks. The unique contribution of this paper is to provide a conceptualization of organizational compassion enmeshed with various modes of power exercised in and by organizations

Emphasising compassion for co-workers in medical school training and healthcare organization to address bullying

EditorialThe over-representation of bullying in healthcare is incongruent with the compassion of healthcare professionals. This issue needs to be addressed at the levels of medical training and organisation by extending the emphasis on compassionate patient care to include care for co-workers

Speak! Paradoxical Effects of a Managerial Culture of ‘Speaking Up’

© 2018 British Academy of Management We explore the intrinsic ambiguity of speaking up in a multinational healthcare subsidiary. A culture change initiative, emphasizing learning and agility through encouraging employees to speak up, gave rise to paradoxical effects. Some employees interpreted a managerial tool for improving effectiveness as an invitation to raise challenging points of difference rather than as something ‘beneficial for the organization’. We show that the process of introducing a culture that aims to encourage employees to speak up can produce tensions and contradictions that make various types of organizational paradoxes salient. Telling people to ‘speak up!’ may render paradoxical tensions salient and even foster a sense of low PsySafe