Scholarly studies have conceptualized leadership from several viewpoints. Some considered it from the perspective of a process, a trait, a behaviour while others from an information-processing and relationship perspective. Among many leadership styles, one of the styles that has started to receive considerable attention in the business world-and duly amplified by the calamitous impact of COVID-19- is compassionate leadership.
Fred, the Chief of Operations, was frustrated and critical of Sally’s performance, saying things like, “You obviously don’t care enough about your work.” Sally looked down and said nothing, even though she had nothing to do with what had happened. Jim whispered to Sally that after the meeting he’d help her learn how to get on Fred’s good side. For the rest of the meeting, everyone nodded in apparent agreement with whatever Fred said, and kept their own ideas to themselves.
Character Values Cheats: Bad Traits
Deploying this strategy will also mean stopping to revisit the goal whenever a new person joins the discussion. The author declares that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest. Unlike any other animal, a woman trying to give birth by herself could easily run into problems.
- Again, part of this was compassionate, but there was also a recognition that having a sick and uneducated population and poor transport services was not good for business.
- Shuck et al. (2019) acknowledge the connection compassionate leader behaviours have to other leadership typologies, yet at the same time dismiss the notion that these typologies are the same.
- You may be surprised to discover traits you don’t like in your new relationship.
These have been the central focus of many spiritual traditions and scientific scrutiny (Baumeister, 1996; Staub, 2003, Zimbardo, 2008). Bandura (2012) suggests 12 possible reasons for our hostilities to others including vengeance, righteousness, protection, belief in a cause, justification and shifting responsibility. The contemplative traditions Jainism, Buddhism and others understood very clearly our potential for callousness and highlighted the importance of training the mind in forms of compassion to stand against it (Ricard, 2015). Concepts of reincarnation were partly instigated as threats against behaving harmfully in this life.
And what about faith-based organizations that support policies and practices that contradict the core teachings of compassion and love at the heart of their own traditions? How can such institutions endorse harsh or punitive actions and still claim to follow the teachings of Jesus, the Buddha, or Allah? Each of these faith traditions calls upon its followers to love, to show mercy, to treat others as they themselves wish to be treated, and to welcome the stranger.
Conducting The Review
Importantly, as some spiritual traditions encourage, we can train our brains to conceptualize humanity as part of our “kin group” (Bailey, 2002). Right wing politicians however are more interested in splitting and setting one group up against another. The review of the articles indicates that compassionate leadership has the potential to have positive effects on both the leadership and the workforce. Training programs can be developed around the different dimensions of compassionate leadership by developing a deeper understanding of what it means to be a compassionate leader. The key practical implications of the review articles are summarized in Table 8.
He highlighted the human potential to be compliant and submissive in carrying out orders (Milgram, 1974). Zimbardo’s Stanford experiments at the same time www.theamoredate.com implied that, give people a role (like a prison guard) and they will gradually adopt the (callous) behaviors of that role. Later, Zimbardo went onto explore a whole range of processes that facilitate good people doing very bad and cruel things that he labeled the Lucifer effect (Zimbardo, 2008). He was one of the investigators of some of the tortures that happened at Abu Ghraib during the Iraq war. Zimbardo (2008) and Sapolsky (2017) both highlight the contextual and social conditions that stimulate the worst in us and that we cannot understand humans as autonomous beings – a treasured but completely erroneous belief of the right-wing.
For the rest of the day, everyone from that meeting was preoccupied with what had happened, and the circle of drama grew. The word compassion originates from the Latin root meaning “co-suffering.” Com means “with” or “together” or “alongside.” Passion means suffering or struggling. It diverts energy towards the pursuit of self-justification, one of the strongest human urges and one that almost always gets us into trouble. It’s about taking sides, forming camps, viewing the struggle as a win-lose proposition, and adopting an adversarial attitude toward resolving the discrepancy between what we want and what we’re getting.
Conflict resolution circles are an essential part of the restorative justice process. These circles bring together the individuals involved in the conflict, along with other relevant stakeholders, to engage in open dialogue and share their experiences and perspectives. Through active listening and empathy, participants gain a deeper understanding of the impact of the conflict on each other. Restorative justice is a philosophy and approach to conflict resolution that focuses on repairing harm, restoring relationships, and promoting healing for all parties involved. It seeks to address the root causes of conflicts and their impact on individuals and the community. Rather than relying solely on punitive measures, restorative justice encourages open dialogue, accountability, and empathy.
Nevertheless, there are sufficient pointers to permit a rough sketch of a classification of the construct compassionate leadership. Webster and Watson (2002) believe that tackling an emerging issue could benefit from exposure to potential theoretical foundations resulting in the development of a proposed conceptual model. The significance of compassionate leadership as an emerging issue is relevant, pertinent and a better understanding is needed.
Hence, individuals who can “stand on their own feet” and make money are regarded as higher status than those who cannot. One of our major transitions from a more aggressive primate past to hunter-gatherer care and share lifestyle was the movement of competition by aggression to competition by attraction (Barkow, 1989; Gilbert et al., 1995). Like so much in evolution, this has had some good effects, but also some downsides. Competition by attraction means one cannot simply impose ones will on others; one has to stimulate an audience to bestow status and share access to resources. Indeed, it is now known that competing for status, with experiences of pride or shame, is a major common dimension of human social behavior (Gilbert, 2007; Durkee et al., 2019) and linked to reputation (Sznycer et al., 2016). Many on the right-wing argue that competition is important because it drives enterprise, and you cannot share resources unless you create them.
Implementing Nonviolent Communication in the workplace takes time and effort. It requires a commitment from all members of the organization to create a culture of empathy, understanding, and effective communication. Table 1 brings together some of the themes addressed above in terms of how different strategies organize the brain.
Compassionate leaders would not only understand but proactively ask and seek information to place themselves in the shoes of their direct reports and act to lighten the suffering. Balasubramanian and Fernandes (2022) pointed out that compassion and care create a sense of togetherness during a crisis. Bavel et al. (2020) argue that leaders’ ability to develop and embed a sense of “us-ness” among followers is essential during the COVID-19 pandemic. A leader’s emphasis during a crisis should be on making a connection rather than correction. Moreover, the leaders must have the humility to listen to the wide range of employee concerns during a crisis. It shows that leaders genuinely care about them and their wellbeing, including mental, emotional, and physical while making decisions (Balasubramanian and Fernandes 2022).
Background On Compassion At The Workplace
Estimates of increased deaths from untreated cancers and other conditions are tragic. United Kingdom governments had received numerous warnings from simulations and medical advisers that the country was not able to cope with any pandemic that would inevitably arrive and yet they chose to do nothing (Hopkins, 2020). This highlights again that recent political shifts have not focused on caring and sharing, but on supporting individuals to control and hold resources for personal use which they believe will enable people to make decisions that advantage all of us. The evidence for a long time however, has been that there is little trickle down and it is mostly gushing up (Sachs, 2012; Carney, 2020). It is not clear if trickle down was ever really believed or was more of a political justification for low tax rates (Toynbee and Walker, 2009; Gilligan, 2011). So with the passing of the years, Western societies have become more self-focused, narcissistic, demanding (Curran and Hill, 2019; Twenge et al., 2014), and less compassionate (Trzeciak and Mazzarelli, 2019).
Evidence suggests that humans adapted their physiological and cognitive systems for extended and extensive parent-infant caring (Hrdy, 2009) and these became a template for a range of social relationships, particularly in small groups. While caring and sharing in hunter-gatherer societies had a number of sources including conflict resolution and prevention, compassion as “the desire to intentionally help others in need and care for them” was certainly one of them (Spikins, 2015, 2017; Kessler, 2020). The basis of this is partly because the same hormones and patterns in the autonomic system underpin all forms of caring. Indeed, many argue that we are hard-wired for caring and sharing even, in certain contexts, with strangers (Keltner et al., 2014); that our basic nature is caring and sharing (Ricard, 2015). This was partly honed in hunter-gatherer groups where it works well and is a source of joy, social safeness and meaning.
The other strategy in contexts of low care is a riskier up rank strategy, to really push one’s luck, display confidence (perhaps even grandiose), seek power and accumulate resources, foregoing sharing caring strategies. These are linked to certain types of narcissism and psychopathy both of which involve toning down caring and sharing motives (Del Giudice, 2016). One version links to a sense of entitlement to treat others as a resource, and in the extreme regulate their relationships through fear. Many of the people in our prisons did not have good starts and their capacities for empathic connectedness to others is limited. It is also the same for some of our politicians and the higher up you go in business, the more you will find the rank focused callous folk who can be superficially charming, but have little interest in caring and sharing (Furtner et al., 2017; Peterson and Palmer, 2019).
The more conflict we experience, the bigger the emotional, physical, and psychological toll it takes on us. Compassionate Accountability is about building stronger relationships while getting results. This both-and breakthrough becomes possible when you recognize that compassion means “to struggle with” others for a better future. Compassion includes accountability for feelings, thoughts, and behaviors. Many have suggested taking the business financing of politics out of the game as a start.
Yet, along with our potential for compassion and self-sacrifice, the last few thousand years of wars, slavery, tortures, and holocausts have shown humans can be extraordinarily selfish, callous, vicious, and cruel. Care and share are less common in non-human primates, but evolved radically in humans during our hunter-gatherer stage when our ancestors lived in relatively interdependent, small, mobile groups. In these groups, individualistic, self-focus, and self-promoting control and hold strategies (trying to secure and accumulate more than others) were shunned and shamed. These caring and sharing hunter-gatherer lifestyles also created the social contexts for the evolution of new forms of childcare and complex human competencies for language, reasoning, planning, empathy, and self-awareness.
