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Jane E. Dutton,1 Kristina M. Workman,2
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• Other articles in this volume Ashley E. Hardin1

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• Top downloaded articles Stephen M. Ross School of Business, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan
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Cornell University School of Hotel Administration, Ithaca, New York 14853

Annu. Rev. Organ. Psychol. Organ. Behav. 2014. Keywords

1:277–304
compassion, suffering, empathic concern, sensemaking, caring
The Annual Review of Organizational Psychology
and Organizational Behavior is online at
orgpsych.annualreviews.org
Abstract
This article’s doi: Compassion is an interpersonal process involving the noticing, feel-
10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-031413-091221 ing, sensemaking, and acting that alleviates the suffering of another
Copyright © 2014 by Annual Reviews. person. This process has recently received substantial attention by or-
All rights reserved ganizational researchers and practitioners alike. This article reviews
what researchers currently know about compassion as it unfolds in
dyadic interactions in work organizations. We begin by reviewing
what we know about the benefits of compassion for the person who
is suffering, for the provider of compassion, and for third parties
who witness or hear about compassion at work. The heart of the ar-
ticle focuses on what research tells us about embedding compassion
in the personal, relational, and organizational contexts in which
Listen to an audio lecture online compassion takes place. We conclude by discussing implications
for practice and for the future research agenda regarding this vital
interpersonal process.

277
 INTRODUCTION
Organizations are emotional arenas (Fineman 2000). Whether due to events in one’s personal life
or organizationally induced, human suffering within organizations is inevitable. When that
suffering is met with concern and caring responses, compassion occurs, and that is the focus of our
review. We survey what we know about the interpersonal process of compassion at work and
expose theoretical and empirical terrains that demand development and new insights. We examine
both empirical and theoretical treatments of compassion in work organizations as well as insights
about this process from studies in psychology in which compassion is portrayed mostly as a feeling
state (e.g., Goetz et al. 2010). By contrast, we conceptualize compassion as an interpersonal
process in which both the sufferer and the focal actor1 play a role in how a particular episode
unfolds over time. Our contribution is twofold. First, we integrate the research to date by modeling
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compassion at work as a dynamic interpersonal process or set of subprocesses (Kanov et al. 2004)
involving two or more individuals that is activated through the noticing of human suffering.
Second, we model this interpersonal process as unfolding at three levels of context—personal,
relational, and organizational. Thus, our review reveals the deeply situated nature of compassion
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and therefore the outcomes that result.

We preface our review by explaining why there is a need to highlight research on compassion at
work and why now is the time to do so. We then describe the breadth of different forms of suffering
at work, the difference that compassion makes in organizations, and the core compassion sub-
processes. Our review reveals the patterning of compassion by showing the contextual embedding
of the compassion process in roles (personal context), features of the relationship (relational
context), and characteristics of the organization (organizational context) that affect its unfolding.
We also review what we know about how personal characteristics affect the process. For orga-
nizational psychologists, understanding the patterning of compassion at work opens new research
inquiries about a crucial interpersonal process that is in its infancy in terms of depth and breadth of
empirical research. At the same time, a focus on compassion reinfuses accounts of interpersonal
relationships at work with the humanity that many scholars have noted is often missing (Adler &
Hansen 2012, Dutton 2003, Tsui 2013), reminding us of what matters most in organizations
(Whetten 2001).
A focus on compassion at work is both timeless and timely (Rynes et al. 2012, Tsui 2013). Its
timelessness arises from compassion’s centrality to religious and philosophical teachings over
centuries that have debated, yet for the most part affirmed, its importance for the human condition
(Nussbaum 1996). The timeliness of a focus on compassion at work arises from new scientific
evidence and recent calls for more enriched relational perspectives in organizational psychology.
Social scientists have revealed basic human drives and interests to be as other-serving as they are
self-serving (e.g., Brown et al. 2011). In addition, depictions of our own species (Keltner 2009) and
related species (De Waal 2009) as born to be kind, empathic, and cooperative affirm this al-
ternative view of humans’ basic motivations. These depictions serve as a corrective to views that
humans conduct themselves in a predominantly self-interested manner, suggesting that com-
passion is a normal and pervasive way of interrelating at work (and beyond) and thus central rather
than peripheral to understanding human experience. The model of compassion at work that we
present takes seriously the embedding of this interpersonal process in the personal, relational, and

1
We have intentionally labeled the two parties involved in compassion episodes as focal actor and sufferer, as opposed to
givers and receivers, to avoid invoking a purely social-exchange mindset or logic. Also, although we acknowledge that
compassion can sometimes involve multiple people suffering and multiple people responding at the same time, for analytic
purposes, we focus on a compassion episode involving two people.

278 Dutton  Workman  Hardin

 organizational contexts and provides new windows into how this other-serving behavior unfolds
in complex social situations.
A focus on compassion at work also fits with the growing focus on relational perspectives in
work (e.g., Dutton & Ragins 2007) that take seriously the centrality of relationships and the role
they play in how works gets done (e.g., Gittell & Douglass 2012) and in employees’ identity and
well-being (e.g., Gersick et al. 2000; Kahn 1993, 1998). Recent reviews of how coworkers matter
(Chiaburu & Harrison 2008) and the underlying dimensions of relationships at work (Ferris
et al. 2009) attest to the importance of understanding interpersonal dynamics and outcomes in
organizations. A focus on interpersonal compassion at work highlights the role of other people in
acknowledging and responding to real, pervasive, and consequential suffering at work (Frost 2003).
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THE BREADTH OF SUFFERING AT WORK

Suffering is triggered by an event or circumstance that is experienced as disruptive or threatening
and that therefore causes a state of distress, which may include physical and emotional pain,
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trauma, existential anguish, concerns about the future, and feelings of disconnection (Cassell
1999, Lilius et al. 2012). The experience is deeply personal, meaning that even if two people
encounter the same difficult situation, whether, why, and how they suffer are likely to be unique
(Cassell 1999).
Suffering at work may arise from events in an individual’s personal life. One of the most
common forms of suffering is grief, “a process that includes the emotional, physical and social
responses to a major loss, most commonly the death of a loved one” (Hazen 2008, p. 79). Grief
often complicates the accomplishment of work tasks for sufferers by causing “mental lapses,
decreased energy, difficulty in making decisions, anxiety, helplessness, inability to concentrate,
preoccupation, social withdrawal, memory gaps, crying, and other seemingly inappropriate (to the
work environment) emotional responses” (Stein & Winokuer 1989, p. 98). In addition to grief,
other personal issues such as the dissolution of romantic relationships (Manns & Little 2011),
mental or physical illness of oneself or a loved one, financial difficulties, or other family issues
(Lilius et al. 2008) may distress, distract, or otherwise strain individuals while they are at work.
Suffering at work may also arise from work itself. Worline & Boik (2006) describe work as
composed of the emotional highs and lows of being a person, and Driver (2007) details ways in
which the lows may be painful experiences that arise when individuals’ emotions, desires, and
needs collide and conflict with organizational realities. Individuals may experience job stress,
a particular form of suffering that is commonly discussed in the organizational literature, as
a consequence of status incongruence (i.e., working in a pay grade that is either higher or lower
than would be commensurate with one’s job experience; Erickson et al. 1972), lack of job security
(Ashford et al. 1989), or even the accumulation of minor everyday hassles (Chamberlain & Zika
1990). After a prolonged period of stress, suffering in the form of burnout may occur as a result of
inadequate control over one’s work, frustrated hopes and expectations, or the feeling of losing
meaning (Iacovides et al. 2003). Work-family conflict may also be a source of significant distress
(Rice et al. 1992).
Negative interpersonal experiences at work can be challenging. Workplaces are increasingly
hostile environments, and “persistent, offensive, abusive, intimidating, malicious, or insulting
behaviors” are on the rise (Lee 2000, p. 593). Dealing with toxic bosses and colleagues (Frost &
Robinson 1999), participating in corrosive politics (e.g., Williams & Dutton 1999), and being
involved in serious forms of negative interpersonal encounters such as sexual harassment, vandalism,
psychological abuse, and workplace violence (Johnson & Indvik 1996, Stewart & Kleiner 1997)
may all evoke suffering.

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 Organizational actions may also trigger suffering. Downsizing unsettles people who lose their
jobs and distresses survivors who are concerned about their colleagues’ losses along with their own
job security (Mishra et al. 2009). Even well-intentioned organizational programs can backfire and
become sources of suffering for workers (Driver 2007). For example, individuals may feel betrayed
if initiatives designed to create more positive, humane workplaces are nothing more than rhetoric
(Victor & Stephens 1994) or if initiatives meant to foster high performance and continuous
learning create extra stress (Driver 2007).
Clearly, suffering is pervasive in the workplace. Statistics on grief, stress, and burnout at work
reveal that suffering is also costly. According to the Grief Recovery Institute, firms lose more than
$75 billion annually due to employees dealing with grief (Zaslow 2002). Estimates of job-stress-
related losses are even greater at $300 billion a year; these losses stem from absenteeism, turnover,
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diminished productivity, and medical, legal, and insurance costs (Rosch 2001). Financial cost
estimates do not do justice to the emotional and physical costs of human pain. By understanding
the benefits of compassion, we begin to appreciate how this form of interpersonal caring reduces
the costs of suffering while providing other gains as well.
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The Difference Compassion at Work Makes

Although the moral and financial motivation to reduce suffering at work is compelling in its own
right, the case for synthesizing and furthering the study of compassion becomes even stronger
when we consider the range of ways that compassion matters at work. Research suggests that
interpersonal compassion has the potential to impact not only sufferers but also focal actors, third
parties, and organizations. Understanding the many forms and avenues of compassion’s impact
underscores the need to continue learning about how compassion unfolds as well as what hinders
or facilitates it.
Most empirical research examines how compassion benefits sufferers. Compassion heals,
allowing people to recover physically from illness and bodily harm (Brody 1992) and psycho-
logically from grief (Bento 1994, Doka 1989). Also, evidence suggests that compassion in the
workplace calls up positive emotions (e.g., gratitude), reduces anxiety (Lilius et al. 2008), and
increases a sufferer’s attachment and commitment to the organization (Grant et al. 2008, Lilius
et al. 2008). At the same time, empirical studies suggest that compassion communicates dignity and
worth from one person to another, helping people at work feel valued (Clark 1987, Dutton et al.
2012, Frost 2003, Frost et al. 2000). This sense of being valued and worthy is not a state that is
a given in work organizations; rather, it is something that is created or destroyed by the way that
people interact with one another at work (Dutton et al. 2012).
Compassion from another person shapes a sufferer’s sensemaking about oneself (e.g., seeing
the self as more capable), one’s peers (e.g., viewing one’s peers as more humane), and one’s
organization (e.g., seeing the organization as caring), in all cases changing interpretations to be
more positive (Lilius et al. 2008). (For details about sensemaking, see Focal Actor and Sufferer
Engaging in Sensemaking, below.) Instrumentally, compassion often involves the provision of
resources (e.g., time, concern, material goods) that can help people resolve or cope with the
sources of their suffering and recover the ability to carry on with their lives (Dutton et al. 2006) and
resume some sense of normalcy at work (Powley 2009). At the same time, compassion from others
is particularly important for preventing or reducing compassion fatigue if one has a caregiving
job (Kahn 1993) or if one routinely deals with suffering clients or coworkers (e.g., O’Donohoe &
Turley 2006).
The literature to date has also described several notable effects of compassion on the person
demonstrating it. Negative consequences for focal actors who attempt to engage in too much

280 Dutton  Workman  Hardin

 compassionate responding may experience compassion fatigue (e.g., Figley 1995), moral distress
from being unable to do what is right and unable to adequately relieve others’ suffering, or
secondary trauma or dysfunction from prolonged exposure to others’ suffering (Halifax 2011).
However, being compassionate may also have beneficial effects on focal actors. Responding
compassionately at work can lead to greater compassion satisfaction—i.e., the satisfaction that
comes from helping others (Stamm 2002)—and is associated with a more prosocial identity, e.g.,
seeing oneself as a caring person (Grant et al. 2008). In addition, a series of studies by Melwani
et al. (2012) demonstrated that people who act compassionately are perceived more strongly as
leaders and that perceived intelligence (i.e., how clever and knowledgeable the person is) mediated
the relationship between compassion and leadership.
Compassion also affects the relationship between the focal actor and the sufferer. Interview
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studies suggest that compassion psychologically connects people, resulting in a stronger felt
connection between coworkers (Frost et al. 2000, Powley 2009). This connection may arise
because compassion breeds trust, as theory suggests (Clark 1987, Dutton et al. 2007). At the same
time, if one person is consistently compassionate toward another over time without experiencing
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compassion flowing in the return direction, this lack of reciprocation may solidify status dif-
ferences or inequalities in the relationship (Clark 1987).
Compassion at work also affects witnesses and bystanders. For example, witnessing com-
passionate encounters may increase feelings of pride about the way that people in an organization
are behaving (Dutton et al. 2007) and may foster elevation, encouraging people to act more for
the common good (Haidt 2002). Research suggests that those who have witnessed compassion
tend to take less punitive action against others unrelated to the compassion episode who have
transgressed in some way (Condon & DeSteno 2011).
Finally, many have suggested that compassion at work yields collective benefits as well,
including higher levels of shared positive emotion (e.g., pride and gratefulness; Dutton et al.
2006) as well as greater collective commitment and lower turnover rates (Grant et al. 2008,
Lilius et al. 2008). Case studies of compassion suggest that this process can also build a collective
unit-level strength of compassion (e.g., Lilius et al. 2011), a collective capacity for healing
(Powley 2009), and overall levels of collaboration (Dutton et al. 2007). Clearly, more extensive
empirical investigations of the effects of compassion as a collective capability of organizations
are needed.

A Model of the Interpersonal Process of Compassion

Episodes of people suffering and others responding are ubiquitous in work organizations. Despite
their pervasiveness, these interpersonal dynamics have generally escaped systematic study. Our
model synthesizes the diverse pieces of research and theory that address this process, revealing
what we know and where future research is needed. In performing this synthesis, we highlight that
compassion is a fluid, dynamic process in which both the sufferer and the focal actor make sense of
the situation and influence each other in ways that can hinder or facilitate compassion.
The interpersonal process of compassion begins with a pain trigger, which initiates suffering
in one person who may or may not explicitly communicate distress. The focal actor begins
responding to this suffering through three interrelated subprocesses—noticing the suffering,
feeling empathic concern, and acting to alleviate the suffering (Kanov et al. 2004). Although some
researchers have noted that these subprocesses sometimes happen simultaneously and that the
distinctions between them are blurry (Way & Tracy 2012, Miller 2007), we treat the subprocesses
as distinct for our analytic purposes (Figure 1). Throughout the process, both sufferers and focal
actors engage in sensemaking in that they interpret each other’s and their own situations and

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 SUFFERER THIRD
PARTY
Pain trigger
and Expressed
experienced suffering
suffering

Sensemaking Outcomes
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Feeling
Noticing empathic Acting
concern
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FOCAL ACTOR(S)

Individual differences Organizational roles

PERSONAL CONTEXT

Similarity Closeness Social power

RELATIONAL CONTEXT

Structure and quality

Shared values Shared beliefs Norms Practices Leaders’ behaviors
of relationships

ORGANIZATIONAL CONTEXT

Figure 1
Subprocesses of response to suffering. The bidirectional arrows between the subprocesses indicate that the processes do not necessarily
unfold in a sequential order, and the overall response process can dynamically flow back and forth between subprocesses (Atkins &
Parker 2012).

conditions at various points in time (Atkins & Parker 2012). These dynamic appraisals can in-
fluence what each person notices, feels, and does, thus changing the way an episode unfolds. This
process results in outcomes for the focal actor, the sufferer, and the third parties, as discussed in the
section above. The final model elements include the contextual features that shape a compassion
episode. Most proximate to the sufferer and the focal actor are individual differences and role
characteristics that affect what a person is likely to notice, feel, and do as well as how he or she
makes sense of the situation. In terms of more distal contextual conditions, research addresses how
aspects of the relational context (similarity, closeness, and social power) and organizational
context (shared values, shared beliefs, norms, practices and routines, structure and quality of
relationships, and leaders’ behaviors) relate to the compassion process. Although the broader
national-cultural context in which the organization is embedded is likely to influence the unfolding
of compassion in the workplace, no research has been done to date, so this is discussed in Future
Research Opportunities, below. We unpack Figure 1 in the remainder of this section.

282 Dutton  Workman  Hardin

 A Sufferer’s Experienced and Expressed Suffering
The stage for compassion is set when a pain trigger occurs and causes someone to suffer (Dutton
et al. 2006). Suffering itself is dynamic, and its intensity and form often change over time (Cutcliffe
2002). Unsure of how to act, sufferers often look to others for cues about what is appropriate or
acceptable with regard to whether, when, and how to express their suffering within a workplace
(Bento 1994). For example, people dealing with loss may sense that their grief is difficult for others
to witness, so they attend to the others’ behavior to gauge the willingness to engage with their grief
(Goodrum 2008). Although sufferers may feel a need to receive emotional support from others,
they may be worried about upsetting people (Goodrum 2008) or may perceive conflicting cues
about how to express suffering (e.g., whether it is right or wrong to cry) (Bento 1994). Accordingly,
sufferers may underplay their suffering, compartmentalize their distress, or pretend to feel okay
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(Goodrum 2008). Thus, people not only experience suffering in individualized ways but also
manage and express suffering to varying degrees and in different ways.
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A Focal Actor Noticing Suffering

Noticing suffering is critical; without it, the compassion process ends. Noticing takes place when
the focal actor becomes aware of another person’s pain (Kanov et al. 2004). Becoming aware of
someone’s suffering implies that the focal actor is singling out certain cues for conscious processing
from his/her ongoing experience at work. Sometimes the awareness and recognition of another’s
suffering is obvious due to clarity and multiplicity of pain cues. However, particularly in work
contexts, these cues are more often faint and ambiguous, making the noticing of suffering an
effortful and recurrent process (Frost 2003). Way’s (2010) study of compassion in the context of
hospice workers suggests that recognizing another’s suffering sometimes involves intuition, active
listening, and seeking out information to understand the other’s situation or condition. Noticing
often requires attending to the sufferer as well as to the situation and circumstances surrounding
the sufferer (Miller 2007).

A Focal Actor Feeling Empathic Concern

Compassion depends not only on the noticing of suffering but also on the extent to which a focal
actor feels empathic concern (Kanov et al. 2004), defined by Batson (1994, p. 606) as “other-
oriented feelings that are most often congruent with the perceived welfare of the other person.”
This emotional subprocess is the dominant way that psychologists have studied and defined
compassion (Goetz et al. 2010). Empathic concern involves feelings of sympathy that tend be
other-oriented and altruistically—as opposed to egoistically—motivated (Batson 1987). These
feelings are a “potent source of motivation to help relieve the empathy-inducing need” (Batson
et al. 2007, p. 65).

A Focal Actor Acting Compassionately

Acting is the subprocess that captures the behaviors of the focal actor that are intended to reduce or
remedy the sufferer’s pain. Atkins & Parker (2012) term these behaviors compassionate actions,
instead of compassionate responding, as a reminder that noticing, empathic concern, and
sensemaking are all part of responding. Acting compassionately can involve a breadth of different
behaviors, ranging from mere presence or listening to more elaborated, coordinated, and durable
actions that involve directing multiple resources toward a sufferer. These resources can be concrete

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 (e.g., clothing, food, cards) or abstract (e.g., attention, time, concern, creation of safe psychological
space) (Frost et al. 2006). Acting compassionately in a work context can often be multilayered and
ongoing (Way & Tracy 2012). It can also be planned or improvised in the moment (Dutton et al.
2006). Acting compassionately includes all of the focal actor’s behaviors that are intended improve
the experience of the sufferer. Because acting compassionately involves actions intended to reduce
the suffering of another person, it differs from social support, whose research focuses on the
“availability of helping relationships and the quality of those relationships” (Leavy 1983, p. 5) or
on specific behaviors that help another feel more efficacious, accepted, and understood (Horowitz
et al. 2001). In some cases, acting compassionately can involve withholding or delaying actions
when doing so is believed to be most helpful to the sufferer (Way & Tracy 2012).
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A Focal Actor and Sufferer Engaging in Sensemaking

Throughout the compassion process, both parties engage in sensemaking. Sensemaking refers to
the interpretive work (Weick 2012) individuals do to turn a disruptive, unintelligible circumstance
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(Weick et al. 2005) “into a situation that is comprehended explicitly in words and that serves
as a springboard into action” (Taylor & Van Every 2000, p. 275). In other words, individuals
make sense as they deal with the ambiguity of ongoing, unknowable, unpredictable experiences
by developing and updating meanings in an effort to answer the questions, What’s the story here?
and Now what should I do? (Weick et al. 2005).
A central issue for a focal actor trying to comprehend what is happening during a potential
compassion episode is to understand the other’s suffering. A focal actor may try to do so by
engaging in perspective taking, either by imagining how the sufferer feels or by imagining how he
or she would feel in the sufferer’s situation (Batson et al. 1997). Although the latter may result in
personal distress, both types of perspective taking are positively related to feeling empathic concern
for the other (Batson et al. 1997).
Focal actors may also try to understand, explain, and make predictions about the role that
a sufferer plays in his/her own misfortunes as well as the role that they play or might play as
responders. Atkins & Parker (2012) draw on cognitive appraisal theory (Lazarus 1991) to identify
three appraisals that are important for compassion: the sufferer’s deservingness of help, the self-
relevance of the sufferer and his/her situation to the focal actor, and the focal actor’s self-efficacy.
Appraisals about sufferers’ deservingness relate to “the moral worth of the other . . . [and] the
other’s complicity in the plight” (Clark 1987, p. 297). Focal actors appraise sufferers as being more
deserving if they perceive them as being of good character, trustworthy, cooperative, and altruistic
(Atkins & Parker 2012). Sufferers are deemed less deserving if they are viewed as responsible
for their own suffering. For instance, focal actors may think that a sufferer brought about his/her
own problems by disregarding common logic (Clark 1987), failing to expend effort to avoid
the situation, or violating situational norms or rules (Goetz et al. 2010). Appraisals about self-
relevance and self-efficacy are more concerned with the focal actor’s own situation relative to that
of the sufferer. Focal actors may judge the extent to which their own broader values and goals are
congruent or incongruent with others’ suffering. Additionally, a focal actor makes calculations
about his/her own ability to cope with the situation, bring about future outcomes, or prevent
undesired outcomes (Atkins & Parker 2012, Goetz et al. 2010). Although descriptions of these
appraisals and their effects show how appraisals can shut down compassion, compassion may also
be strengthened for those deemed particularly innocent and deserving, in situations that are
particularly self-relevant, and when a focal actor feels particularly capable of acting. Also, whereas
Batson et al. (2007) discuss valuing the welfare of the person in need (i.e., perceiving the sufferer as
deserving) as an antecedent or precondition for empathic concern, our model suggests a more fluid

284 Dutton  Workman  Hardin

 relationship in which appraisals may occur throughout the process rather than only prior to feeling
concern. In this way, it is possible for empathic concern to arise more spontaneously and later be
moderated one way or the other on the basis of one or more appraisals.
Sensemaking is ongoing. Once actors make sense of a situation and often act in response to this
“sense,” those actions and their consequences generate the raw materials available for the next
episode of sensemaking and lead to new ways of noticing and interpreting (Jeong & Brower 2008,
Weick 2001). Evidence from research by Crocker & Canevello (2008) suggests that sufferers may
make sense of what motivates others’ supportive or compassionate behavior, and such attributions
may influence whether sufferers respond positively to focal actors in future interactions by providing
support if the focal actors themselves seem to be suffering. In addition, an ethnography of a volunteer
search-and-rescue group by Lois (2001) reveals that the ways in which focal actors help a sufferer
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make sense of his/her situation and his/her role in it enable them to manage their own emotions
and enable others to provide the assistance necessary to reduce suffering and resolve the problem
at hand. Taken together, these studies show that the dynamic, interpersonal nature of compassion
is particularly salient in the sensemaking subprocess as both the sufferer and the focal actor seek
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to comprehend the situation and their roles in relation to it and each other.

COMPASSION UNFOLDING IN CONTEXT

As mentioned above, research reveals that attributes and conditions operating at three levels
of context (personal, relational, and organizational) affect the process and outcomes of a com-
passion episode. Below we review the different features of the levels of context that research has
examined to date.

Personal Embedding of the Compassion Process

The personal context of people involved in a compassion episode encompasses the individual
differences and organizational roles of both the focal actor and the sufferer. Because these features
are person-specific, we cluster these two contextual features together. However, because studies
to date consider only the personal context of the focal actor, we review these elements here and
look to future research to consider the personal context of the sufferer.

Focal actors’ individual differences. Research suggests that individual differences among focal
actors affect compassion subprocesses. These individual differences include personality traits and
disposition, individual abilities, demographic characteristics, and knowledge. Variation among
these attributes helps account for the reasons that focal actors may differ in the way they com-
passionately respond at work.
Psychologists have examined how individual differences in attachment style are associated
with the emotional element of compassion, feelings of empathic concern. Bowlby (1983) first
suggested a possible link between the attachment style of an individual, which is formed in early
childhood and influenced by the availability and supportiveness of caretakers, and the compassion
demonstrated by that individual throughout life. Testing this theory, Mikulincer et al. (2001)
primed individuals for a secure attachment style and measured felt empathy (Batson et al. 1989)
after reading a story of suffering. Individuals primed for a secure attachment style exhibited more
empathy than did a control group. Those with a more secure attachment style have more positive
working models of support in times of need, and this support allows them to show support for
others (Mikulincer & Shaver 2005). In compassion episodes at work, focal actors with more
secure attachment styles are more likely to feel greater empathic concern for a sufferer.

www.annualreviews.org  Compassion at Work 285

 A focal actor’s personality traits may also influence his/her ability to feel empathic concern
when a work colleague is suffering. For example, in one self-report study (Shiota et al. 2006),
feelings of compassion were positively correlated with extroversion, agreeableness, and openness
to new experiences. Extroversion, an energetic approach toward the social world, is associated
with sociability and positive emotions; agreeableness, a prosocial and communal orientation, is
associated with altruism and tender-mindedness; and openness is associated with a wide breadth,
depth, and complexity in one’s mental capacity and life experiences (John et al. 2008). Individuals
who are more social, communally oriented, and open may more be more likely to attend to others,
notice their suffering, and process it in ways that lead to empathic concern.
Psychological flexibility, first defined by Bond et al. (2006), is an ability that affects com-
passion. It “refers to being open and curious regarding the present moment and, depending on
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what the situation affords, acting in accordance with one’s chosen values” (Atkins & Parker 2012,
p. 528). Atkins & Parker (2012) argue that psychological flexibility clears the path for compassion
by centering individuals on the present moment in a nonjudgmental way, potentially impacting
all aspects of the process. In particular, mindfulness and present-moment contact increase the
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likelihood of noticing suffering in work contexts by directing the focal actor’s attention to the
situation and its immediate cues (Atkins & Parker 2012). The reduced personal distress associated
with psychological flexibility, stemming from the use of fewer attentional resources to control the
situation, leads to more empathic concern for others because (a) stepping back from one’s own
emotions leaves room for contextualizing others’ emotions, (b) lessened automatic reactivity
assists in allowing sensemaking to unfold, and (c) reduced defensiveness and enhanced self-
regulation facilitate taking action (Atkins & Parker 2012).
Research suggests that two demographic characteristics of the focal actor impact an in-
terpersonal compassion episode: gender and socioeconomic status (SES). Historically, data re-
garding gender differences related to compassion have tended to be mixed (e.g., Broverman et al.
1972, Oveis et al. 2010, Stellar et al. 2012, Taylor et al. 2000). For instance, in one of three
studies, Stellar et al. (2012) found that women tend to report elevated levels of empathy.
In contrast, Mercadillo et al. (2011) found no differences in reported compassionate feelings
(empathy) between men and women after the participants viewed compassion-inducing photos.
In this same study, functional magnetic resonance images revealed underlying differences in
brain activation: Women have more diverse activation in the frontal lobe, the temporal lobe,
and the anterior cingulate cortex; men have activation concentrated in the cerebellum and the
anterior cingulate cortex. Taken together, these results suggest gender differences in the experience
of compassionate feelings, with women experiencing more elaborate activation in emotional and
empathic brain processes than men, but men and women did not differ in baseline amounts of
compassion (Mercadillo et al. 2011).
Research also suggests that individuals with lower SES are more likely to perceive a sufferer
as more distressed and to feel more empathic concern (Kraus et al. 2012, Stellar et al. 2012). An
increase in perceived distress results from two mechanisms (Stellar et al. 2012): being more
empathically accurate (Kraus et al. 2010) and reacting more negatively to threats impacting others
(Chen & Matthews 2001). Empathic accuracy—defined as the accurate identification of the
emotions of others (see below)—stems from an increased dependence on external resources, which
increases attention to context and the surrounding environment (Kraus et al. 2010). Increases in
attention on the part of lower-SES individuals make them more likely to notice suffering com-
municated through behavioral rather than verbal cues. Heightened reaction to threats is a con-
ditioned response resulting from unpredictable environments and a bias toward appraising the
world as threatening (Chen & Matthews 2001). Lower-SES individuals are also more likely to
exhibit physiological cues related to the emotions of individuals with whom they are interrelating,

286 Dutton  Workman  Hardin

 such as mirroring the cardiovascular reactivity of a suffering other (E. Page-Gould, K. Koslov &
W.B. Mendes, unpublished manuscript), demonstrating a higher likelihood of empathic concern.
Stellar et al. (2012) also found greater levels of empathic concern among lower-SES individuals
after the participants watched compassion-inducing films. Taylor et al. (2000) suggest that
individuals develop alternative strategies to cope with stressful environments and external threats,
like those faced by lower-SES individuals, by engaging in more affiliative behaviors and building
cooperative networks for withstanding challenges, both of which are conducive to compassion
(Stellar et al. 2012).
Individuals also vary in their familiarity with and knowledge about certain kinds of suffering.
A focal actor’s levels of knowledge and experience with the sufferer’s situation are also likely to
affect whether he/she notices the signs that someone is suffering, is able to take the sufferer’s
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perspective (and impute meaning that prompts action), and acts compassionately. For example, in
a detailed account of how one Big Ten university business school (BTUBS) responded to students’
suffering from damage and loss from a house fire, the person who played the pivotal role in
galvanizing the noticing of suffering and mobilizing of resources for the students was a person
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who had survived a house fire herself and thus had relevant experience (Dutton et al. 2006). This
person had seen firsthand what kinds of compassionate actions were most helpful in the case of
a house fire, and she applied this knowledge in the role she improvised in the compassion episode.

A focal actor’s organizational role. Roles capture the behavior that is expected of a particular
person in an organization (Katz & Kahn 1978). Any individual can have singular or multiple roles
at any one point in time, and these roles can vary in how ambiguous or clear-cut they are (Kahn
et al. 1964). Roles that people take or are given in work organizations endow them with resources
(such as status and legitimacy; Baker & Faulkner 1991) that facilitate compassion. At the same
time, roles are defined by the expectations from the organization and from others interacting with
a role incumbent that, depending on the features of the role, may constrain compassion.
Researchers suggest that three features of the focal actor’s role are important in shaping the
compassion process. First, the level of professionalism applied to certain roles may create
expectations that one should not overly express emotion or act in too caring a fashion toward
someone who is suffering. When individuals are socialized into a role, they learn the degree and
kind of emotional labor that is expected (Miller 2002, p. 588). If people have been socialized into
roles in which emotion or caring is considered to be unprofessional, not legitimate, or not self-
relevant (Atkins & Parker 2012), then several subprocesses of compassion are likely to be weak
or nonexistent. For example, Frost et al.’s (2000) analysis of compassion narratives in university
settings and Miller’s (2002) account of her own response to the bonfire disaster at Texas A&M
made clear that being in the role of professor created doubts about how to be professional and
caring at the same time in the face of students’ and colleagues’ suffering. Her experience suggested
that with her professional role, she found it more difficult to justify being compassionate toward
students. Second, roles also vary in the level of cognitive load that they impose on role holders;
therefore, because of ideas about limits or constraints on cognitive or attentional resources (Miller
1956), people in some roles are likely to have more limited resources to devote to the compassion
subprocesses. Indirect evidence for this claim comes from experimental studies of how attentional
demands affect people’s ability to sympathize with children in pain. The study by Dickert & Slovic
(2009) demonstrates that when people confront others, in this case, images of single victims, they
respond emotionally with more sympathy than they do if they are distracted by other victims. The
researchers use this study to argue that attentional demands affect emotional responses. In the case
of a focal actor, this could mean that when people experience role overload or demanding tasks,
their ability to feel empathic concern for a sufferer may be constrained.

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 The idea that the emotional load carried by a role holder affects a person’s capacity to com-
passionately respond is recognized by people who study roles that involve extensive emotional
work. In contrast to emotional labor, the idea of emotional work or emotional care emphasizes
that some jobs require authentic emotional responsiveness and investment in others (e.g., Lilius
2012, Lopez 2006). Sometimes this type of emotional work can deplete resources and make it
difficult to respond to people in pain.
Third, individuals can chose to take on higher emotional loads through the types of roles they
design for themselves. For example, research on the role of toxin handlers in work organizations
suggests that some employees voluntarily take on the role of attending to and facilitating the
processing of human pain at work (Frost & Robinson 1999). People who take on this role often
purposively notice pain and engage in compassionate actions when pain is detected (e.g., through
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listening, holding space, and extricating people from painful situations) (Frost 2003). In terms
of understanding compassion at work, the idea of toxin handlers suggests that employees may
exercise choice in the degree to which they take on and respond to the suffering of others.
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Relational Embedding of the Compassion Process

Compassion episodes unfold in the context of the relationship between the sufferer and the focal
actor. Research suggests that three features of the relational context shape compassion: similarity,
closeness, and social power.

Similarity. Similarity refers to the extent to which focal actors perceive that sufferers are like them
in a particular dimension or in general. Valdesolo & DeSteno (2011), for example, conducted an
experiment to examine the role of synchrony and similarity in altruistic responses toward victims
of moral transgressions. The authors found that participants perceived themselves as similar to the
victim and liked the victim more when parties (i.e., participant and confederate victim) were
engaged in synchronous action (i.e., tapping a rhythm in sync). In turn, perceived similarity, but
not liking, was positively associated with self-reports of compassionate feelings for the victim, and
compassionate feelings mediated the positive effect of perceived similarity on the amount of time
that participants spent helping the victim with an unjustly time-consuming task. Valdesolo &
DeSteno (2011) argue that similarity mediates the effect of synchrony on compassionate feeling
and action because it creates a sense of unity, directs attention to similar others’ situations, generates
interest in their well-being, and motivates helping behavior. Interestingly, the relationship between
similarity and compassion seems to be bidirectional. Across three studies in which compassion was
either induced or measured as a trait, Oveis et al. (2010) found that it was positively associated with
increased perceived self-other similarity, particularly to weak or vulnerable others. In this way,
compassion brings about the very condition that creates more compassion.

Closeness. Relationships at work also vary in how close or distant people are from one another.
Relationship closeness captures how familiar, intimate, and proximate one person is to another.
Several researchers have implied that relationship closeness should impact a compassionate epi-
sode in a variety of ways. For example, Clark (1987) suggests that relationship closeness affects the
felt obligation to respond to another person’s pain, because when people are close, they have wider
sympathy margins. In other words, if the connection that two people share is deeper, then the range
of events for which sympathy (or in this case, compassion) is appropriate is broader, and the
sympathy felt for the relationship partner is more extensive and more genuine. The result is that
focal actors feel they should inquire more into how a person is doing, have deeper knowledge of
past incidents of pain, and thus be more able to compassionately respond to a sufferer (Clark

288 Dutton  Workman  Hardin

 1987). Similarly, Frost et al. (2000) found that knowing someone well helped employees know
when and how to act toward someone’s suffering. Way & Tracy (2012) found that stronger
identification created closeness, which made it easier for a focal actor to relate to and respond to the
sufferer. Relationship closeness provides the knowledge and emotional bonding that facilitate the
recognition that someone is suffering, as well as when and how to respond in meaningful ways.

Social power. Citing Fiske (1993), van Kleef et al. (2008) state that social power “reflects the
relative influence an individual exerts over other people’s outcomes, and is experienced in terms of
the sense of control, agency, and freedom” (pp. 1315–16). It is a characteristic of dyadic rela-
tionships at work that can affect both the sufferer’s expression of suffering and the likelihood that
focal actors will engage in compassion. For example, those in positions of leadership are generally
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expected to “keep a stiff upper lip” and continue with their work as normal, despite whatever
distress or hardship they may be experiencing at work (Bento 1994). A person with higher status,
such as a leader, who has greater social power relative to others is less likely to express suffering.
This effect of social power likely makes it more difficult for others to notice a leader’s suffering
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and respond with compassion.

Social power also affects compassion episodes through its effects on social perception. Con-
sistent with the approach/inhibition theory of power (Keltner et al. 2003), research shows that
higher-power individuals tend to experience and express more positive emotion and less negative
emotion than do lower-power people (Berdahl & Martorana 2006, Galinsky et al. 2006).
Experiments by Galinsky and colleagues (2006) show that individuals with more power are less
inclined to adopt others’ perspectives, and they are less accurate at perceiving others’ emotions.
These dynamics may partly explain differences in the distress and felt compassion for others. In
a study in which pairs of individuals shared personal stories of events that caused suffering, van
Kleef et al. (2008) found that higher levels of sharers’ distress caused increases in compassion and
distress only for listeners with lower, as opposed to higher, power. This relationship may be even
stronger in organizations because employees pay particular attention to supervisors’ behavior and
are concerned with the quality of relationships they share (Tyler & Lind 1992).
The effects of social power are not, however, always negative. In some circumstances, social
power can enhance or facilitate empathic accuracy (Ickes et al. 1990, Levenson & Ruef 1992).
Given that power increases the tendency to behave in a goal-congruent fashion, Côté and col-
leagues (2011) hypothesized that moderating the effects of power may explain conflicting findings
with regard to whether prosocial orientation—a focus on the needs of others and an inclination to
enhance the welfare of others (Batson & Shaw 1991, Grant & Mayer 2009)—influences empathic
accuracy. In a series of three experiments, Côté et al. (2011) found that people with trait or induced
prosocial orientation had better empathic accuracy only when they were dispositionally higher in
power or induced to feel more power. Thus, although social power may hinder compassion in
some situations, it may also facilitate noticing and feeling when those who are higher in power are
already oriented toward compassion.

Organizational Embedding of the Compassion Process

Compassion unfolds within the boundaries of an organization. Research suggests that six features
of the organization relate to the process and outcomes of compassion: shared values, shared
beliefs, norms, practices, structure and quality of relationships, and leaders’ behaviors.

Shared values. Shared organizational values refer to what people in an organization believe is
important. Organizational values sensitize individuals so they are able to notice certain situations

www.annualreviews.org  Compassion at Work 289

 and actions (Dutton et al. 2006) and shape sensemaking (e.g., Smircich 1983); such values also
provide an impetus for certain kinds of actions (O’Reilly & Chatman 1996). Organizational values
communicate what is significant, and, as a result, they affect the compassion process. For example,
Dutton et al.’s (2006) study of one BTUBS’s response to students who suffered loss from a house
fire suggests that the value of treating individuals as whole people affected the noticing of suffering.
This organizational value helped foster the sharing of the news about the students’ suffering while
also legitimizing their painful circumstances as real and significant. This finding is consistent with
Bento’s (1994) argument that in organizations in which people can bring only their professional
selves to work (so the whole person is less valued), grief will be stifled and thus the compassion
process will be restricted or nonexistent.
Research also suggests that the shared value of care is important in explaining a higher level of
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compassionate action. In a recent study of retrospective accounts of how work organizations

responded to the floods of 2011 in Brisbane, Australia, Simpson et al. (2013) found that the value
of caring (or what the authors termed a caring philosophy) distinguished employers who acted in
more or less compassionate ways.
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Shared beliefs. Whereas values pertain to what is viewed as important, shared organizational
beliefs capture what organizational members believe to be true (Trice & Beyer 1993). In the study
of the student fire at the BTUBS cited above (Dutton et al. 2006), the shared belief that it was okay
to “put one’s humanity on display” made sharing the circumstances of the three students more
likely, facilitating the speed and scope of compassionate responding.
In addition, shared beliefs that pertain to the permeability of boundaries between people’s
personal and professional lives also apply to the understanding of patterns of compassion (Lilius
et al. 2011). In organizations whose members believe that it is acceptable and desirable to know
about a fellow member’s personal life and act on that knowledge (e.g., Ashforth et al. 2000),
individuals are more likely to share that they are in pain at work, and colleagues may feel more
justified to notice, feel, and act to alleviate the pain.

Norms. Normative patterns of behavior that typify an organization can shape both the expres-
sion of suffering and how a focal actor is likely to respond during episodes of compassion. Norms
capture the pattern of an organization’s expected behaviors that are shaped over time and that
constrain future action to comply with the norms (Schein 1985). For example, there are often
norms about displays of grief at work that affect compassion. In one study of employees’ grief
responses to losing family members to murder, researchers found that “grief displayed at the
wrong time, in the wrong place, or to the wrong person presented a norm violation and often
brought negative reactions from others” (Goodrum 2008, p. 429). This observation fits findings
that organizational norms tend to “reward the repression of negative emotion . . . Sadness and
_
grief should be checked at the door as they are too heavy for the rarified emotional atmospheres
of the workplace” (Bento 1994, p. 35).
Organizational norms about emotional expression are sometimes termed feeling rules, which
shape whether and how emotions get displayed at work (Hochschild 1983). These rules can limit
how suffering gets expressed and thus impact the noticing and sensemaking around an
employee’s suffering as well as compassionate actions. Some researchers have used the term
expression tolerance to describe these norms around emotional expression, noting that anger
expressions at work (as a form of personal pain expression) are likely to be followed by com-
passion when expression tolerance is high (Zenteno-Hidalgo & Geddes 2012). Organizational
norms also affect compassionate actions. For example, some researchers argue that norms of self-
interest shape whether people feel that it is socially inappropriate to act compassionately. In an

290 Dutton  Workman  Hardin

 experimental study, Molinsky et al. (2012) demonstrated that priming an economic schema (a
knowledge structure that prioritizes rationality, self-interest, and efficiency) reduced how
compassionately a person communicated bad news to another person (in this case, loss of
a scholarship). Their research also suggests that this impact happened by reducing empathy and
increasing felt unprofessionalism. Thus, norms—in this case, shared beliefs that favor self-
interest, efficiency, and/or rationality—may dampen compassion toward another through
multiple pathways.

Organizational practices. Organizations develop repeated patterning of actions that researchers

term practices (Orlikowski 1992), which also shape the compassion process. Sometimes these
practices get formalized as programs due to the need for efficiency and coordination. Several
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studies detail how organizational practices provide repeated ways of doing that shape what
unfolds during compassion episodes at work. These practices encourage people to pay attention to
particular kinds of feelings, provide frames for making sense of the sufferer’s and focal actors’
situations, and provide scripts for certain kinds of actions. Three detailed case studies (Dutton et al.
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2006, Lilius et al. 2011, McClelland 2012), including one survey study in a health-care setting
(McClelland 2012), document the importance of organizational practices in shaping compassion.
All these studies suggest that organizational practices directly affect the likelihood and form of
compassion in a particular case of suffering, as well as the overall pattern of compassion across
a range of episodes.
Research supports the importance of four sets of practices that impact compassion episodes.
First, practices that select people for employment on the basis of their relational skills are likely to
create an organization where more people are likely to notice, feel, and act with compassion at
work. For example, McClelland’s (2012) research showed that hospitals used both behavioral
interviewing and potential employees’ responses to claims about being a culture of compassion in
order to select people who were more likely to behave compassionately at work. Second, employee
assistance and employee support practices that give people at work the opportunity and means for
helping employees in need also facilitate compassion. For example, Grant et al. (2008) found that
participation in a practice that allowed the donation of a dollar a week to an organizational fund
helping employees in need strengthened the degree to which employees acquired a prosocial
identity as caring people. Building on the idea that one’s identity shapes what one notices and how
one responds to a situation, we would expect a caring identity to foster caring behaviors directed
toward people who are suffering at work. McClelland (2012) found that the existence of formal
employee support practices (including practices that provided both emotional support and ma-
terial support) were important in fostering compassion toward the hospital’s patients. A third
employee support practice that impacts compassion episodes is notification of harm: procedures
for notifying other people if someone at work is experiencing painful circumstances. For example,
John Chambers, CEO of Cisco, established HR communication practices to let him know of
anyone in the global company who had experienced a severe loss, such as a serious illness or the
death of a family member, so that he could personally contact them (Dutton et al. 2002). This
practice not only facilitates the noticing of suffering but also communicates a value that respond-
ing to suffering is important.
Fourth, organizations have practices that reward and recognize people for their helping
(McClelland 2012). Where people are routinely rewarded and recognized for helping one another,
there is a premium put on noticing need and responding. In addition, these types of practices
encourage the interpretation that suffering is legitimate and real and are likely to foster positive
meaning associated with being a contributor or giver to others, thus further fostering prosocial and
helpful actions.

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 Structure and quality of relationships. Compassion is also shaped by the overall structure and
quality of relationships between people in the organization. A dyadic episode of compassion is
triggered and unfolds in the context of a relational fabric of the organization. The relational fabric
of an organization is captured by both the patterning of network ties and the quality of the
connections between people in those ties. When network ties are strong, news about someone’s
painful circumstances is more likely to spread. This network-tie effect became evident when
notification of harm for the three students impacted by the fire at the BTUBS traveled quickly
across multiple subnetworks in the school through rapid interpersonal and electronic commu-
nication (Dutton et al. 2006). Network ties facilitate social interactions, which are the basis for
spreading feelings and coordinating compassionate actions (Madden et al. 2012). When the ties
between organizational members are also high quality (e.g., characterized by mutuality, positive
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regard, and vitality) (Dutton & Heaphy 2003), people are likely more emotionally attached to one
another (Kahn 1998), and this attachment facilitates noticing, feeling, and acting toward someone
if he or she is suffering (Lilius 2012). The link between connection quality and compassion was
highly evident in the case study of the Midwest Billing Department (Lilius et al. 2011), where
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people characterized their relations as loving and caring. As Fredrickson (2013) suggests, this form
of connection is marked by positivity resonance (i.e., the joint effects of three neurobiological
events: the sharing of positive emotions, a synchronizing of both persons’ biochemistries, and
a motivation to invest in each other’s well-being), which fosters resilience and other adaptive
responses. In the case of organizations, these higher-quality connections make it easier for people
to express suffering as well as for others to respond to suffering, fostering the allocation of
resources to people in pain (Lilius et al. 2011).

Leaders’ behaviors. The last cluster of organizational features that affects compassion at work
involves leaders’ behaviors. Leaders play a symbolic and instrumental role in signaling and
modeling the necessary and appropriate responses to suffering. Examples of leader compassion
described in popular texts on leadership (e.g., Boyatzis & McKee 2005) and exhibited in times of
crisis, as in the wake of 9/11 (e.g., Dutton et al. 2002), illustrate how leaders’ actions help people
frame the meaning of suffering as well as model and anchor appropriate acts of compassion. In
addition, leaders’ formal power and status give them the means to shape the other contextual
factors mentioned above (e.g., shared values, shared beliefs, practices, structure and quality of
relationships) that facilitate or retard compassion. The aforementioned example in which Cisco
CEO John Chambers created notification-of-harm practices that facilitate quick identification of
employees who are experiencing a severe loss (Dutton et al. 2002) is a good illustration of how
leaders shape contexts in which compassion takes place. Although books suggest that leadership
is central to work-based compassion (e.g., Frost 2003), to date no systematic empirical studies
address how leadership matters in terms of compassion at work.
In sum, features of the organizational context are critical for understanding how compassion
episodes unfold. These contextual factors touch the full range of subprocesses that compose a
compassion episode, meaning that there are multiple pathways by which their impact on this vital
interpersonal process is felt.

KEY OBSERVATIONS ABOUT RESEARCH TO DATE ON COMPASSION AT

WORK
Ample evidence supports the idea that compassion at work matters, and our review brings order
to some of the complexity in compassion processes at work. Three observations stand out. First,
compassion has multiple subprocesses that may occur in different orders, can be recursive and

292 Dutton  Workman  Hardin

 repeated, and may be affected by different antecedents. Each subprocess—noticing suffering,
feeling empathic concern, acting to alleviate suffering, and engaging in sensemaking about what
has occurred—is important, and each needs to be understood to fully comprehend the what, the
how, and the when of compassion at work. In addition, we need to know more about the
relationships between these subprocesses. Second, compassion at work has been described and
researched primarily from the perspective of the focal actor. Although compassion at work has
been theorized as a dyadic process, it has been empirically studied more as an individual-level
process, with a focus on the focal actor; we know less about how the sufferer shapes the process and
its outcomes. Third, research suggests that three levels of nested context (personal, relational, and
organizational) shape the compassion process by affecting one or more subprocesses that impact
the focal actor’s responses primarily.
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Table 1 summarizes the major links between the different aspects of context and the com-
passion process. As the summary suggests, each study tends to look at a single part of the
compassion process, leaving considerable room for future researchers to take a more holistic and
systematic approach to determining how the patterning of contextual enablers or disablers shapes
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whether and how interpersonal compassion unfolds. Also unclear is how the organization shapes
empathic concern. Just as inquiry into dyadic relationships at work is fragmented (Ferris et al.
2009), the fragmented inquiry of compassion research has limited our capacity to draw clear
conclusions about how the compassion process works.

Future Research Opportunities

Compassion at work is a research topic that is still in its infancy. In general, research on com-
passion is dominated by theoretical and theory-building studies, opening wide possibilities for
theory-testing studies that address both the process and the outcomes of compassion at work. We
see five areas in which future research would be particularly valuable: exploring and testing how
compassion matters at work, exploring and testing the sufferer’s role in and experience of the
compassion process, highlighting the interactional and relational nature of compassion, exam-
ining cross-cultural differences in compassionate responding at work, and improving the mea-
surement and testing of compassion.

Explore and test how compassion matters at work. This review has itemized what research has
documented about the impacts of interpersonal compassion at multiple levels of analysis.
However, more systematic research that considers the short-term and long-term impacts of
compassion on job attitudes (e.g., engagement, thriving), job behaviors (e.g., prosocial behav-
iors, creativity, ethical actions), job performance, health outcomes for individuals (episode
participants and third parties, including employees, customers, buyers, and other organiza-
tionally relevant parties), and patterns of future interactions by organizational members
(Lawrence & Maitlis 2012) is clearly warranted. Additionally, it would be fruitful to examine
the way in which a single compassion episode unfolds and affects the potential for compassion in
subsequent encounters with suffering. We know from some empirical work that when sufferers
experience compassion at work, it alters their conceptions of their coworkers, themselves, and
their organizations through sensemaking (Lilius et al. 2008). Future research might examine
how people learn from compassion episodes and how these lessons are applied to future sit-
uations that involve suffering and the potential for compassion. Whereas the research on
practices and compassion explains one way that compassion gets institutionalized and infused
into the organization’s culture (Lilius et al. 2011, McClelland 2012), much more research on
institutionalizing mechanisms would help explain patterns of compassion at work over time. In

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 Table 1 Summary of relationships between different aspects of context and subprocesses in compassion at work

Subprocess Personal context Relational context Organizational context

A sufferer’s Professionalism may decrease Increased status may lead a sufferer Organizationally shared beliefs
experienced expressions of suffering (Atkins & to be less likely to express shape what emotions are
and expressed Parker 2012) suffering (Bento 1994, Berdahl & acceptable to put on display and
suffering Martorana 2006) when (Ashforth et al. 2000,
Goodrum 2008), sometimes
rewarding the suppression of
negative emotion (Bento 1994)
Shared beliefs about permeable
boundaries between personal
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and public life allow individuals to

express suffering at work (Dutton
et al. 2006, Lilius et al. 2011)
Feeling rules, including
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expression tolerance, impact

how and when individuals
express suffering at work
(Hochschild 1983, Miller 2002)
A focal actor Psychological flexibility increases A closer relationship with the The shared value of treating
noticing the noticing of suffering (Atkins & sufferer causes the focal actor to individuals as whole people
suffering Parker 2012) be more likely to inquire about facilitates communication about
Lower SESa increases the noticing suffering (Clark 1987, Frost et al. suffering (Dutton et al. 2006)
of suffering (Kraus et al. 2010) 2000, Way & Tracy 2012) High-quality relationships in an
The more experience with a type of organization increase the
suffering, the greater the likelihood of noticing (Dutton
likelihood of noticing the et al. 2006)
suffering (Dutton et al. 2006)
A focal actor A more secure attachment style Self-other similarity increases
feeling increases feelings of empathy feelings of compassion (Valdesolo
empathic (Mikulincer & Shaver 2005) & DeSteno 2011)
concern Personality traits of extroversion, High status may make individuals
agreeableness, and openness less likely to be empathically
increase feelings of empathy accurate (Galinsky et al. 2006)
(Shiota et al. 2006) Social power moderates the effect
Psychological flexibility increases felt of sufferer distress on responder
empathy (Atkins & Parker 2012) compassion such that the
Individuals with a lower SESa are relationship is significant only for
more empathically accurate (Kraus those with less power (van Kleef
et al. 2010) et al. 2008)
Constraints on cognitive or Social power strengthens the
attentional resources may reduce positive relationship between
empathic feelings (Dickert & Slovic prosocial orientation and
2009) empathic accuracy (Côté et al.
People in roles that focus on 2011)
emotional work requiring authentic
feeling may experience more
empathic concern (Lopez 2006)

(Continued )

294 Dutton  Workman  Hardin

 Table 1 (Continued )

Subprocess Personal context Relational context Organizational context

A focal actor Psychological flexibility increases A closer relationship with the People in organizations with the
acting to actions taken (Atkins & Parker sufferer causes the focal actor to shared belief that it is acceptable
alleviate 2012) be more likely to act (Clark 1987, to know about and act on an
suffering People who take on roles like those Frost et al. 2000, Way & Tracy individual’s personal life are
of toxin handlers may exhibit 2012) more likely to act to alleviate
more compassionate actions suffering (Ashforth et al. 2000)
(Frost 2003) In organizations with shared
values that emphasize care,
people are more likely to act
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compassionately (Simpson et al.

2013)
Norms of self-interest make
individuals less likely to act
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compassionately (Molinsky
et al. 2012)
Organizations have practices that
make certain compassionate
actions easier to execute than
others (Dutton et al. 2006, Lilius
et al. 2011, McClelland 2012)
Leaders’ behavior models
appropriate responses to
suffering (Boyatzis & McKee
2005, Dutton et al. 2002)
A focal actor Psychological flexibility through Individuals with more power are Feeling rules impact sensemaking
and sufferer lessened automatic reactivity allows less inclined to adopt others’ around an employee’s suffering
engaging in sensemaking to unfold more fully perspectives (Galinsky et al. 2006) (Hochschild 1983)
sensemaking (Atkins & Parker 2012) Leaders’ attitudes help frame the
A focal actor’s knowledge about the meaning of suffering associated
sufferer’s situation is likely to affect with large events such as 9/11
whether the focal actor is able to (Dutton et al. 2002)
take the sufferer’s perspective
(Dutton et al. 2006)

a
SES, socioeconomic status.

sum, we believe that much more could be done to systematically test the effects of interpersonal
compassion at work on a broader set of dependent variables as well as test the mechanisms through
which they operate.

Explore and test the sufferer’s role in and experience of the compassion process. We need to know
much more about the sufferer in the compassion process. For example, how does the personal
context of the sufferers (in particular, their individual differences and their role characteristics)
matter for compassion? How do sufferers communicate how they are in pain, and what difference
do information and feelings conveyed about suffering and desired responses make for how an-
other individual (or group of individuals) notices, feels, and acts toward this person? The literature
tends to take for granted that sufferers will be open to, ready for, or accepting of compassionate

www.annualreviews.org  Compassion at Work 295

 responses, but this may not be the case. Research on social support at work, for example, reveals
that actions intended by others as helpful may be unwanted, and when that is the case, these
actions may actually be harmful (Beehr et al. 2010). Even if sufferers want a compassionate re-
sponse, they may have ideas that differ from the focal actor’s ideas about what would be most
helpful. Although research has certainly shown that employees experience personal and orga-
nizationally induced suffering, it has not yet considered how employees in pain shape how others
respond constructively in the form of compassion.
Similarly, we need to know how sufferers shape and respond to the compassionate acts of
others. How do they feel about, make sense of, and respond to these acts of care? How do they
evaluate the focal actors’ intentions and the compassionate actions themselves? Furthermore, it
is important to recognize that individuals are usually in numerous dyadic relationships with
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others at work (e.g., superiors, coworkers, subordinates, clients), and together these rela-
tionships form the larger web of relationships within which single dyadic interactions occur
(Ferrin et al. 2006). When a particular individual is suffering, more than one individual or group
may be responding to the sufferer independently of one another. We need to know how
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individuals experience the unfolding of multiple compassion episodes simultaneously and how
sufferers make sense of compassion from one person in light of the responses they do or do not
invoke in others. At a more basic level, it might be informative to explore whether or when
sufferers realize that others are trying to respond to them in a compassionate manner. Com-
passion may go unnoticed by the sufferer when it is so skillfully accomplished that it is sometimes
rendered invisible (Frost 1999).

Highlight the interactional and relational nature of compassion. Questions about the role and
experience of the sufferer highlight the interpersonal nature of compassion. In addressing the
literature’s blind spot with regard to the sufferer’s role in and experience of a compassion
episode, scholars should be careful not to overcorrect and focus only on the sufferer while
excluding the focal actor. We encourage future research that examines how these two parties,
and potentially third parties, interact and intentionally or unintentionally alter each other’s
thoughts, feelings, and behavior throughout a particular compassion episode or over a series of
episodes. Researchers might consider how focal actors determine whether sufferers are resistant
to compassionate responses, and if so, when and how they might attempt to overcome such
resistance. Further work to clarify how the power of the focal actor affects the range and nature
of compassionate actions would be a useful contribution. Future compassion research might
also focus on how the nature and quality of the relationship between a sufferer and a focal actor
change during a compassion episode and how changes in connections last and affect other types
of interactions.
Whereas our review has highlighted how attentional, cognitive, and emotional processes
matter primarily from the perspective of the focal actor, we need to know much more about the
relational mechanisms that undergird the compassion process. In particular, we believe that it
would be fruitful to theorize beyond a view of compassion episodes that assumes participants
are engaged in a type of social exchange process (Blau 1964), in which focal actors give com-
passion to sufferers who receive it and there is a type of over-time motivation to achieve some
balance of trade. Even in more sociological accounts of compassion (or sympathy), this focus
on exchange occurs, here in terms of emotional currency, when people make gestures “that
symbolize the sentiments of one person, which are of use, advantage or value to another” (Clark
1987, p. 297).
Future research might explore alternative models of interrelating at work that are less directly
instrumental and more embodied as potentially fruitful candidates for understanding something

296 Dutton  Workman  Hardin

 as basic and human as the dynamics of compassion at work. For example, Fredrickson (2013)
offers a theory of positivity resonance to account for how moments of connectivity (such as
moments of interpersonal compassion) benefit both people in an interaction through a natural
syncing up of people’s bodies and brains in ways that foster health and well-being. This model
differs from a social exchange view of what motivates human interaction in that it points to how
human beings’ biological systems are exquisitely designed to detect and respond to one another’s
changes in moods without cognitive mediation or calculation of what is given or received in
interaction. Fredrickson’s theory of positivity resonance writes back in some of the biological bases
and consequences of short-term interactions (Heaphy & Dutton 2008) that provide a different
account of why compassion matters at work. The general point is that we need richer accounts of
the relational mechanisms underlying compassion to better explain when and how this process
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unfolds at work, and with what consequence.

Examine cross-cultural differences in compassionate responding at work. Surprisingly little

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theorizing has been offered about national-cultural influence on compassion at work. A few
researchers have looked at how societal culture shapes beliefs around suffering and what is de-
serving of compassion (Clark 1987, Hazen 2008), including when suffering may be attributable
to the sufferer’s prior actions (Sullivan et al. 2012) and how culture impacts the meaning and
motivations for compassion (Kitayama & Markus 2000). However, cultural factors become even
more critical as we seek to understand how compassion unfolds in an ever-growing global
working context.
Societal culture may influence norms, including appropriate feeling rules, how suffering is
expressed in the workplace, what responses are deemed effective in alleviating suffering, and
what beliefs and values may influence the importance placed on those responses. Many ques-
tions need to be explored: Across different cultures, how is suffering expressed in the workplace?
Are all cultures equally perceptive in noticing the pain of coworkers? Are different types of
suffering considered acceptable to discuss in the workplace across cultures? How do appropriate
responses to suffering in the workplace vary? Are impacts of compassion in the workplace the
same across cultures?

Improve the measurement and testing of compassion. Testing the impacts of compassion will also
require the development and testing of better measures of interpersonal compassion at work.
Measures will need to treat compassion as a process that is captured from the perspective of both
participants in the process. For the focal actor, measures will need to focus on the degree and
dynamics of the noticing of suffering, the degree and dynamics of the empathic concern for the
other, and the intentions and actions directed toward the sufferer. For the sufferer, measures will
need to capture the experience of suffering (and its dynamics over time) as well as the perceived
compassion or the degree to which a sufferer believes that another person notices their suffering,
feels empathic concern, and acts to alleviate the suffering.
Furthermore, researchers who study compassion at work quantitatively should use methods
designed specifically to examine dyads in organizations (Gooty & Yammarino 2011, Krasikova &
LeBreton 2012). The use of these kinds of analytic approaches would allow for the modeling
of within-dyad interdependence and take into account the mutual influences between the focal
actor and the sufferer over time. The use of these methods not only would allow for better alignment
between theory and method but also would open up new theoretical questions about how
compassion-based interactions at work are distinct from—versus similar to—other kinds of
dyadic interactions (e.g., mentoring, helping, social supporting).

www.annualreviews.org  Compassion at Work 297

 PRACTICAL IMPLICATIONS
Given the important benefits of compassion at work discussed above, organizations and indi-
viduals within them must reduce organizational barriers to noticing coworkers’ suffering, feeling
that suffering, and acting to alleviate the suffering, as well as strengthen the contextual enablers of
compassion. See Table 2 for a summary.

Implications for Individuals

Individuals, as focal actors, can cultivate skills to aid in the unfolding of compassionate responding
in the workplace. One possibility involves deliberately opening oneself to noticing and accepting
that “there is always pain in the room” (a phrase our colleague Peter Frost frequently used). A
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second option would be to cultivate mindfulness as a mechanism for improving the noticing and
feeling of the pain of others at work (Atkins & Parker 2012). Research suggests that meditation is
also a powerful means for increasing people’s responses to others’ suffering (Condon et al. 2013).
Individuals may also craft their jobs so that their roles provide them with resources to feel, make
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sense of, and respond to workplace suffering (Wrzesniewski & Dutton 2001). For example, people
could consult with those more experienced in dealing with particular kinds of suffering and seek
their advice about how to act compassionately.
As sufferers or focal actors, individuals need to keep in mind that compassion is a relational
process. Each party’s actions, or lack thereof, affect the other. For instance, although it may not
always be possible, appropriate, or easy, sufferers may play an active role in facilitating com-
passion from others by being explicit about the causes and extent of their suffering as well as by
communicating their own ideas about how others might help relieve it. Focal actors may do their
part by trying to make sufferers feel safe and comfortable engaging in such dialogues. Both parties
should be mindful, however, that opening up in this way may be more difficult if the relationship
they share is not close or if there are power differentials between them. In such cases, a helpful step
before actions aimed directly at minimizing suffering might be to work on finding common ground
and developing a closer connection. By taking an open and cooperative approach, sufferers and
focal actors can reduce uncertainty about what has happened and what can be done about it, and
both parties may feel greater self-efficacy with regard to alleviating suffering.

Table 2 Practical implications of research on compassion at work for individuals and organizations

Individuals Organizations

Individuals can cultivate skills to facilitate compassionate responding by: Leaders are in a unique position to promote workplace
n Deliberately acknowledging and accepting the pervasive presence compassion through:
of suffering in the workplace n Treating individuals as whole people who carry
n Cultivating mindfulness and practicing meditation emotions into the workplace and display them
n Crafting one’s job to ensure that the role provides resources to n Encouraging permeable work and life boundaries
feel, make sense of, and respond to workplace suffering n Facilitating high-quality relationships among
The process takes place in a relational context, which has three employees
implications: n Implementing practices that support compassion—for
n Sufferers can be more explicit about suffering and needs example, by using selection and socialization
n Focal actors can make efforts to create psychological safety for practices, employee support practices, or other
expressing suffering practices that foster noticing, feeling, sensemaking,
n Both sufferers and focal actors can work to strengthen the quality and acting in ways that foster compassion
of connections

298 Dutton  Workman  Hardin

 Implications for Organizations
As we have seen, organizations greatly impact the unfolding of compassion in the workplace,
which leads directly to implications for managerial practice. Leaders should strive to exhibit be-
havior in line with promoting compassion: treating individuals as whole people who carry emo-
tions into the workplace and display them (Dutton et al. 2006), encouraging permeable work and
life boundaries (Lilius et al. 2011), and facilitating high-quality relationships among employees
(Dutton et al. 2006). Alternatively, leaders could work to implement practices that support
compassion—for example, by using selection and socialization practices, employee support
practices, or other practices that foster noticing, feeling, sensemaking, and acting in ways that
foster compassion.
Annu. Rev. Organ. Psychol. Organ. Behav. 2014.1:277-304. Downloaded from www.annualreviews.org

CONCLUDING THOUGHTS
Studying compassion at work brings researchers face-to-face with the dark (suffering) and the
light (compassion) sides of human experiences at work. The research is both heartbreaking
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(Whiteman 2010) and heartwarming (Dutton & Workman 2011), thus requiring an emotional
readiness for working with these ideas and an intellectual motivation to work through the variety
of conceptual and empirical challenges associated with a new research domain. We hope that
this review of the theoretical and empirical work to date motivates new impactful research that
not only fills holes but also opens new frontiers of insight about this critical relational process
that is interwoven in the fabric of the lives of people at work.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
The authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that
might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A special thanks to Sue Ashford, Oana Branzei, Jason Kanov, Jacoba Lilius, Sally Maitlis, and
Frederick Morgeson for their comments on a previous draft of this review.

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Organizational
Psychology and
Organizational Behavior

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What Was, What Is, and What May Be in OP/OB

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Lyman W. Porter and Benjamin Schneider . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1

Psychological Safety: The History, Renaissance, and Future of an
Interpersonal Construct
Amy C. Edmondson and Zhike Lei . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23
Personality and Cognitive Ability as Predictors of Effective
Performance at Work
Neal Schmitt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45
Perspectives on Power in Organizations
Cameron Anderson and Sebastien Brion . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 67
Work–Family Boundary Dynamics
Tammy D. Allen, Eunae Cho, and Laurenz L. Meier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 99
Coworkers Behaving Badly: The Impact of Coworker Deviant
Behavior upon Individual Employees
Sandra L. Robinson, Wei Wang, and Christian Kiewitz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123
The Fascinating Psychological Microfoundations of Strategy and
Competitive Advantage
Robert E. Ployhart and Donald Hale, Jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 145
Employee Voice and Silence
Elizabeth W. Morrison . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 173
The Story of Why We Stay: A Review of Job Embeddedness
Thomas William Lee, Tyler C. Burch, and Terence R. Mitchell . . . . . . . . 199
Where Global and Virtual Meet: The Value of Examining the
Intersection of These Elements in Twenty-First-Century Teams
Cristina B. Gibson, Laura Huang, Bradley L. Kirkman,
and Debra L. Shapiro . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 217

viii
 Learning in the Twenty-First-Century Workplace
Raymond A. Noe, Alena D.M. Clarke, and Howard J. Klein . . . . . . . . . . 245
Compassion at Work
Jane E. Dutton, Kristina M. Workman, and Ashley E. Hardin . . . . . . . . . 277
Talent Management: Conceptual Approaches and Practical Challenges
Peter Cappelli and JR Keller . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 305
Research on Workplace Creativity: A Review and Redirection
Jing Zhou and Inga J. Hoever . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 333
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The Contemporary Career: A Work–Home Perspective

Jeffrey H. Greenhaus and Ellen Ernst Kossek . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 361
Burnout and Work Engagement: The JD–R Approach
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Arnold B. Bakker, Evangelia Demerouti, and Ana Isabel Sanz-Vergel . . . 389

The Psychology of Entrepreneurship
Michael Frese and Michael M. Gielnik . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 413
Delineating and Reviewing the Role of Newcomer Capital in
Organizational Socialization
Talya N. Bauer and Berrin Erdogan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 439
Emotional Intelligence in Organizations
Stéphane Côté . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 459
Intercultural Competence
Kwok Leung, Soon Ang, and Mei Ling Tan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 489
Pay Dispersion
Jason D. Shaw . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521
Constructively Managing Conflicts in Organizations
Dean Tjosvold, Alfred S.H. Wong, and Nancy Yi Feng Chen . . . . . . . . . . 545
An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure: Improving
Research Quality Before Data Collection
Herman Aguinis and Robert J. Vandenberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 569

Errata

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