A key challenge for organizations in the post-pandemic era is to reconcile managers' demands for performance and innovation, on the one hand, and employees' needs for well-being, on the other hand. Indeed, as never before, today's organizations are exposed to acute external disruptions, such as financial shocks, geopolitical turmoil, pandemic crises and commercial wars, which dramatically threaten not only the employees' capacity to meet ambitious performance and innovation targets, but also the possibility for them to preserve of a worthy quality of life at work. However, despite need for "healthy" organizational practices - i.e., that are supportive of both employee performance/innovation and well-being - research has surprisingly fallen short to address this critical issue.
In the present manuscript, we build on and extend current theorizing on compassion at work by unveiling compassion organizing - defined as organizational repurposing and redirecting routines used for normal work to address members' suffering - as a new bundle of organizational practices that are expected to support organizations' capacity to conciliate the performance/innovation-well-being corundum in the workplace. Drawing on two complementary theories, attachment theory and cue consistency theory, as well as on the literature on workplace compassion, we hypothesize that: a) job autonomy transmits (i.e., mediates) the benefits of compassion organizing for benefit employee performance, innovation and job satisfaction; and b) transformational leadership amplifies (i.e., moderates) these positive indirect effects.
To test our research model, we conducted a three-wave and multi-source study on 369 employees working in a Canadian provincial government organization. Hierarchical linear modeling results fully supported our predictions. Our study contributes to a new theoretical, empirical and practical understanding of how organizational practices that are supportive of compassion at work can help organizations conciliate the managerial demands for heightened performance and innovation with employees' needs for improved psychological health at work.