Navigating Compassion in Emotionally Demanding Contexts

How do organizational members balance serving others while protecting themselves from emotionally taxing situations? How do they manage to sustain compassion over time?

Navigating the contradictory needs of enacting compassion and care while protecting the self from distressing experiences is a recurrent challenge for many organizational members. These tensions are even more acute for workers and volunteers in human services organizations—such as healthcare, welfare agencies, police and the military, firefighters, refugee services, and homeless shelters—who face extreme emotional situations daily.

Ignoring the needs of the self can lead to emotional and psychological distress, manifesting in burnout, emotional exhaustion, or compassion fatigue, which negatively affect organizational performance. Mishandling these tensions can result in detachment, avoidance, and distancing from those in need, potentially leading to inhumane treatment, counter to the organization’s purpose and goals.

In our study, recently published in Journal of Management Studies, we sought to understand how organizations can create environments that foster and sustain compassion.

The Role of Temporal Work

Our two-year ethnographic study in an extreme context—a palliative care hospice for vulnerable individuals at the end of life—revealed the critical role of temporal experience in organizations. We found that managing temporal patterns can enhance compassionate practices while sustaining collaborators’ well-being. These findings offer ways for organizations to cultivate more compassionate and resilient work environments.

Mechanisms to Sustain Compassion

We identified several mechanisms for sustaining compassion in an organization:

# Temporal Work

Organizing and influencing temporal patterns can help sustain compassion and reduce burnout by focusing on the present. Allowing individuals to focus on the here and now opens a sense of agency and possibility, even in the face of uncertain or potentially unsuccessful futures, that some contexts imply.

# Being-with and Being-by the Compassion-Receiver

Different ways of engaging in compassionate relationships shape our experience of time. Enabling transitions between these modes can benefit organizations needing to sustain organized compassion over time.

“Being-with” involves an existential openness toward the other, allowing one to notice another’s suffering and feel it with them. This thickens the time experience, shaped by the sacred and imbued with a spiritual connection with others, termed Kairos. As an ecstatic time, Kairos means an intense experience of shared time during an encounter where physical sensations and emotional presence orient one toward the other. Adopting such an orientation is a powerful mechanism for connecting with and responding compassionately to others. However, it is also energy-consuming and unsustainable over time, necessitating a return to chronos.

“Being-by” involves attuning to tasks and performing them as a meaningful way of compassionate care, preserving the practice of compassion by lowering the intensity of the emotional demand of being-with the other. Here, the subjective experience of time is chronological, experienced as time passes by, marked by the rhythm of tasks performed as compassion present-at-hand. Chronos, although based on clock time, gains subjective significance through mundane events, enabling existential distancing from the sacred and spiritual connection with the compassion-receiver.

Constructing a World for Compassion

These practices construct a world where noticing, feeling, and acting to alleviate another’s suffering can be sustainably performed over time. They also allow organizational members to care for their own needs while extending themselves to others through potentially taxing work. Further, they reinforce one another. For example, attuning with others affects how organizational members experience time, allowing them to slow down, become more self-reflective, and orient themselves toward the other. This experience depends on the organizational members’ exposure to compassion-receivers and their associated needs based on existential spatiality. The possibility of switching to tasks performed at an existential distance allows them to restore the self, a need peers accept. Organizational members can respect their emotional states and need not expose themselves continuously because they can perform different tasks as compassion in different spaces.

Organizations need to find their way to construct a compassionate world. Allowing individuals to cope alone with the emotional demands of serving others can undermine both compassion and personal well-being. Our research shows it is possible to build a different organizational world by adopting varied notions of time and modes of practicing by infusing meaning into the tasks at hand.

Future research might explore how organizations can open new worlds by altering shared background practices to focus on other types of concerns.

Conclusion

Our study highlights the importance of temporal work in fostering compassion and resilience in extreme contexts. By managing temporal patterns and embracing different ways of being, organizations can create environments that support both compassion and well-being.