New research finds that the more compassionate people are, the better able they are to deal with broken promises in the workplace. Specifically, the study suggests that compassion makes employees tougher: more emotionally resilient, higher performing, and less likely to seek new work when they feel their employer has broken a promise to them.
“People often equate compassion with weakness or softness, but this work underscores the ways in which compassion actually makes people resilient – and how that can affect their behavior in the workplace,” says Tom Zagenczyk, co-author of a paper on the work and a professor of management in North Carolina State University’s Poole College of Management.
At issue is a concept called psychological contract breach (PCB), which in this context refers to instances when an employee feels their employer has broken a promise. For example, the employee may not have gotten an expected raise or their employer’s mission may have changed in unexpected ways.
“There is already substantial research on what organizations and managers can do to maintain employee performance and reduce turnover when employees feel the employer hasn’t met agreed-upon obligations,” says Sara Krivacek, first author of the paper and an assistant professor of management at James Madison University.
“But there has been much less work done that focuses on the employees themselves,” Krivacek says. “We wanted to see how compassion may affect the way people cope with PCB in the workplace. Specifically, we wanted to look at two types of compassion: self-compassion, which is the extent to which people are kind and care for themselves; and other-compassion, the extent to which people are kind and caring toward other people.”
The researchers collected data for this study during the pandemic.
“This is significant because the lack of interaction with peers during the pandemic made it an opportune time to study the role an individual’s traits play in coping with PCB,” Zagenczyk says. “Typically, relationships with co-workers and supervisors help employees cope with PCBs on the job. Because people were working remotely, we were better able to determine the role that an individual’s personal characteristics play.”
For this study, the researchers conducted three surveys of English-speaking white-collar workers in the Netherlands at one-month intervals: 439 workers responded to the first survey; 382 of those workers completed the second survey; and 330 workers completed all three surveys.
The first survey was designed to determine the degree to which study participants experienced PCBs in the previous month. The second survey was designed to capture “violation feelings,” meaning negative feelings that employees had toward their employer – such as feelings of anger, betrayal or disappointment. The second survey also assessed each study participant’s levels of self-compassion and other-compassion. The third survey addressed issues such as intentions to leave the employer, job performance and emotional exhaustion.
“First off, the study tells us that violation feelings stemming from PCBs – anger, betrayal, etc. –are what drive negative outcomes like emotional exhaustion,” Krivacek says. “However, the study also tells us that compassion also plays a significant role in the extent to which people experience these negative outcomes – though the two types of compassion play very different roles.
“For example, we found that the higher an individual’s levels of self-compassion, the less emotionally exhausted they were – even when they were experiencing violation feelings after a PCB,” Krivacek says. “This suggests that self-compassion better equips individuals to deal with these negative emotions, which is important.”
“By the same token, employees with higher levels of other-compassion were less likely to consider leaving the job and reported higher levels of workplace performance,” Zagenczyk says. “This suggests that concerns about workplace colleagues make people less likely to slack off or quit, even when they feel their employer has acted badly.”
“In addition, while the results encourage employees to harness self- and other-compassion during challenging times at work, prior research suggests organizations can also foster this practice,” Krivacek says. “Specifically, self- and other-compassion are not just inherent traits; prior interventional work has shown that employees can develop and increase their own self- and other-compassion through training.
“Therefore, while organizations cannot realistically eliminate the degree to which employees experience PCB (that would be a broken promise in itself!), they can consider incorporating workshops and training programs that focus on fostering these practices,” Krivacek says. “Also, organizations prone to high levels of PCB may consider hiring job candidates with higher levels of compassion, if other factors such as knowledge, skills and abilities are relatively equivalent.”
The paper, “Softening the Blow: The Mitigating Effect of Compassion on the Negative Consequences of Psychological Contract Breach and Violation Feelings,” is published open access in the Journal of Business Ethics. The paper was co-authored by Yannick Griep, an associate professor at Samergo, Rotterdam, the Netherlands and North-West University, Potchefstroom, South Africa; and by Kevin Cruz, an assistant professor of management at Georgia Southern University.
Journal
Journal of Business Ethics
Method of Research
Observational study
Subject of Research
People
Article Title
Softening the Blow: The Mitigating Effect of Compassion on the Negative Consequences of Psychological Contract Breach and Violation Feelings
Article Publication Date
24-May-2025
