In the eye of the sufferer: The impact of perceived motivation and expectations for compassion on sufferer’s emotional engagement

Abstract

Compassion—an empathically motivated behavioral response to suffering that has been linked to numerous organizational benefits—is understood to be a relational process, but our understanding of the sufferer’s role in how that process plays out and to what effect is lacking due to limited attention to this role in the extant compassion literature. This hinders our knowledge of compassion as well as our understanding of how to promote workplace compassion. To address this, we conducted two studies examining how sufferers’ perceptions of compassion givers’ motives (other-oriented and self-oriented, which may co-occur) and their own expectations for compassion affect how they experience compassion. Results show that while the impact of compassion on sufferers’ emotional engagement was enhanced when they viewed compassion givers as more other-oriented and weakened when they viewed them as more self-oriented, these relationships were nuanced and also moderated by sufferers’ expectations. In particular, when sufferers saw compassion givers as more self-oriented, this only lessened the positive impact of compassion for sufferers when they concurrently perceived low other-oriented motives; this effect went away when they perceived other-oriented motives as concurrently high. A three-way interaction was also identified such that sufferers benefited from compassion more when they had high expectations for compassion and saw compassion givers as highly other-oriented regardless of how self-oriented compassion givers concurrently seemed to be. We discuss the results, implications, and limitations.

JEL Classification: M14