About this Research Topic

Background

This Research Topic is based on the International Webinar "Compassion and Compassionate Leadership in the Workplace". You can access the recorded webinar here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSXjAdztRYU

How can we make workplaces better for people across the world? A fundamental human orientation is compassion. In this Research Topic, we aim to explore how compassion and compassionate leadership at work can help us to ensure that the experience of work improves for all by creating pleasant work environments.

Compassion (in an organizational context) can be understood as having four components: (i) attending, (ii) understanding, (iii) empathizing, and (iv) helping (Atkins & Parker, 2012). In the context of an interaction between people, compassion involves:
1. Attending – paying attention to the other and noticing their suffering;
2. Understanding – understanding what is causing the other’s distress, by making an appraisal of the cause, ideally through a dialogue;
3. Empathizing – having a felt empathic response, to some extent mirroring the other’s distress;
4. Helping or serving – taking thoughtful, skilled, and appropriate action to help relieve the other’s suffering, or at least to help them cope more effectively with it.

The purpose of being compassionate at work is to create the conditions where all are supported to have the best and most fulfilling work-lives possible. Compassion at work includes being effective in pursuit of a commitment to embodying our values in the work we do, which requires shared direction, alignment, and commitment. Compassion also implies inclusion, which means working together in a way that includes all, regardless of professional background, opinion, skin color, sexuality, religion, or gender. Compassion implies sharing power by encouraging collective leadership, where all feel they have some leadership influence. Finally, compassion requires us to work together to develop a climate of shared purpose prioritizing high-quality outcomes (for the organization, those we serve, and those who work in the organization) in our workplaces overall, rather than just in our individual areas of responsibility.

Compassionate leaders embody both a sensitivity to the challenges that those they lead face, and a commitment to help them respond effectively to those challenges and to thrive in the process of their work.

It involves four key behaviors:
• Attending: being present with and attending to those they lead (Kline, 2002);
• Understanding: understanding through dialogue with those they lead (West et al., 2015);
• Empathizing: being able to feel the distress or frustration of those they lead without being overwhelmed by the emotions and therefore unable to help (Gilbert, 2010);
• Helping: the helping element has four components: scope – breadth of resources offered; scale – the volume of resources; speed – the timeliness of the response; and specialization – the extent to which the response meets the real needs of the other) (Lilius, Kanov, Dutton, Worline, & Maitlis, 2011).

We welcome empirical and theoretical articles, perspectives and review papers that engage with any of the following (but not limited to) areas of interest:

• Impact of compassion on others’ well-being at work;
• Impact of our compassion on our well-being at work;
• Compassion and inclusion;
• Compassion and compassionate leadership in teams;
• Building skills for compassion and compassionate leadership;
• Compassionate leadership across boundaries;
• Assessing compassion and compassionate leadership;
• Cognitive, affective and context factors promoting compassion;
• Positive Interventions to promote compassion in teams;
• Developing compassionate leadership;
• Compassionate cultures and organizational performance;
• Compassionate cultures and performance in healthcare organizations;
• Compassionate cultures and customer, service user, patient satisfaction;
• Assessing compassionate cultures;
• Compassion and resilience;
• Self-compassion and propensity to be compassionate towards others;
• Personal resources, attitudes, dispositional traits, and compassionate leadership;
• The role of cognitive and motivational process in compassion.

Although we are open to considering all types of scientific submissions, we are particularly interested in those that have a strong empirical basis.  Multidisciplinary approaches, as well as cross-country, cross-cultural studies are welcome. Empirical papers that utilize key models and/or longitudinal designs are preferred, however, review papers that make a distinct contribution to knowledge will also be considered.


***The Call for the Research Topic on “Compassion and Compassionate Leadership in the Workplace” is promoted by an International Webinar, occurred on November 30th, 2020

The recordings are uploaded in the Research Topic webpage, for those who were unable to attend and for dissemination or teaching purposes.***

Keywords: Compassion, compassionate leadership, engagement, well-being

Important note: All contributions to this Research Topic must be within the scope of the section and journal to which they are submitted, as defined in their mission statements. Frontiers reserves the right to guide an out-of-scope manuscript to a more suitable section or journal at any stage of peer review.

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