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Fears of Compassion: Workplace (and beyond) Depression, Stress and Anxiety

Anxiety, depression, and stress (distress) are huge burdens on professional and personal health. Depression is the most commonly reported workplace disorder. Employees will more likely experience burnout when they experience work-related stress. Sleep disturbances, difficulty making decisions, problems with concentration, trouble remembering instructions or tasks, fatigue, and lack of interest in tasks are all common symptoms of anxiety and depression that may impact workplace performance. Understanding sources of employee distress is critical for organizational/personal well-being and may be addressed through an easy, intrinsic tool we all can facilitate, compassion. Interestingly, some regard compassion as a “touchy feely” type of thing, potentially even a weakness. When confronted with the fact compassion is a deeply researched, trainable quality which entails fierce courage many are surprised.

A simple behavioral definition of compassion is:

Noticing suffering (of self and others)
Having an empathic emotional response
Taking action to address the suffering

When managers do not express compassion when conducting layoffs or pay cuts, employees are more likely to file wrongful termination lawsuits, and engage in workplace deviance. On the other hand, employees are less likely to leave their job if their employer/ leader is prosocial. Pertinent to organizations, compassion is related to prosocial behavior, engagement and organizational citizenship behavior. Compassion also serves a profoundly important evolutionary function, in providing care, nurturance, affiliative bonding, safeness and trust; all of which are central to the survival of our species.

Another key aspect is the recognition that compassion is really a three way street: We can extend it to others, we can receive it from others and we can show it to ourselves by practicing self-compassion. Importantly, research shows that Compassion in all three directions is strongly correlated with improved immune system functioning and physical well-being, as well as improved psychological functioning.

On a fundamental level, most humans are likely to endorse compassion as something to strive towards. It is part of our political, religious, and ethical worlds, shared in hospitals, schools, workplaces, communities and nations. It takes fierce courage to get in contact with suffering, sustain motivation to address the suffering. Such commitment to be present to, and engaged with suffering is of course hardly a weakness!

Fears of Compassion?

Simple, right? If compassion is so good for us, we can all just engage in it, and all humanity can easily have a better life. So what is getting in our way? Professor Paul Gilbert, the founder of Compassion Focused Therapy has developed a powerful framework for understanding compassion and as importantly, fears of compassion. Extending compassion to others can entail fear of being used, or taken advantage of. Allowing others to come close and help us can entail fears of being perceived as weak or needy.

Further, trusting others to support us can also entail the fear they will abandon us, and fail to show up for us when we’ll need them the most. Understandably, for many people pushing others away, avoidance, can feel safer. Of course, we also push ourselves away from our own caring emotions when we avoid/numb-out, or engage in critical threat based thoughts, rather than being self-compassionate. Current research shows these attitudes can carry grave repercussions.

Research

While it is understandable that our sense of threat and self-protection may lead us towards these fearful responses to compassion, it is also imperative that we recognize the noxious impact of such attitudes. In a recent study we’ve run, replicating and expanding Dr. Gilbert’s European team’s studies with a population (371) of working adults, we’ve found a strong, highly significant relationship between fears of compassion in all three directions and symptomatic markers of stress, depression and anxiety as well as burnout and compassion fatigue. Given our interest in workplace outcomes, we sadly see a strongly significant relationship between positive leadership capacity and the three fears as well.

In other words, the more fearful an individual is of being compassionate the more likely they are to suffer, experiencing psychological and physiological distress. What is more, elevated burnout and compassion fatigue levels result in lower worker well-being and productivity. Adding on top of that lower capacities for positive leadership, we find that the absence of compassion can generate a continuous downward spiral which will manifest on both the individual and collective societal levels.

In our next in this series of blogs, we will establish the impact and benefit of this deeper, research based approach to understanding and applying compassion in multiple venues, from personal well-being to workforce productivity, civic engagement to quality of life.

Sales, Service Orientation and Compassion

SALES, SERVICE ORIENTATION and COMPASSION

Think for a moment about the last time a #salesperson sincerely listened to your needs, empathized with your dilemma or concerns, and did their best to address your situation. How did you feel? What emotions did it bring up? Did it help to be listened to? Did it help to feel understood and cared for? Did it help when your helper was grounded and focused on your needs; committed to helping you discover what you need? Consider those with positions that touch people in circumstances where emotions run high, and where listening makes the difference between a heated conflict or having needs met and distress soothed-never as easy as it seems, in fact quite emotionally laborious!

Evolution and Service to Others

It may not be at the top of our minds, but when we think of such questions we might recognize that receiving help, as well as offering help to others are deeply rooted in our psyches and DNA, since the beginning of time. For those working in service oriented occupations and industries, we can argue we are looking to hire exactly that, those who exemplify these deep social needs behaviorally. While these are core features to any close, intimate family and friendship relationship, research shows us that being treated with a sense of care is important across the board, irrespective of occupation or interpersonal situation.

Commonality of Service Positions

For instance, we might note that being treated with respect and attentiveness will also be appealing to an airplane passenger, trying to decide between chicken or pasta, or a customer doing a 2AM consult at a 24/7 pharmacy, or a student who is in class with a caring teacher, or a patient laying in a hospital bed post operation, being attended to by a compassionate nurse, let alone a salesperson. The thread between these very different professions is that in some way all of these individuals are receiving human service, a critical predictor of organizational performance.

The use of service orientation measures for pre-employment purposes is well established, but we argue that that compassion and service orientation are strongly related and propose proven methods to increase service orientation through compassion training.

Service Orientation

Service Orientation is considered “being attentive, pleasant, and courteous to customers”. And refers to a “set of basic individual predispositions and an inclination to provide service, to be courteous and helpful in dealing with customers and associates”. Those higher in their service orientation are self-controlled, dependable, well-adjusted, and likable, and they will readily assist customers, especially with problem-solving and meeting customers’ needs. Similar to emotional intelligence, service-oriented individuals tend to demonstrate better job performance, as well as higher levels of other desirable social and psychological features such as self-acceptance, a sense of well-being, responsibility, self-control, and tolerance. Research on altruistic personality as well as prosocial organizational behavior suggests that personality across situations can lead to service-oriented behavior.

Service Orientation and Compassion

While service orientation leads to the use of more adaptive customer-service behaviors, resulting in more positive service delivery, higher service quality, and enhanced customer satisfaction, compassion facilitates the addressing of clients needs through the activation of emotional, cognitive, and behavioral domains at the individual and group level. At least three elements of compassion have been established relevant to service orientation: noticing another’s suffering, empathically feeling the person’s pain, and acting to ease their suffering, to extend compassion. These findings suggest that individuals higher in their service orientation have better service attitudes, adapt themselves better to diverse customers, and deliver services in a more positive manner than those lower in this personality trait.

Given these findings it is not surprising that being compassionate

is also likely to support an individual in offering a more caring service.

This could manifest in service providers through competencies such as emotional stability, expressed empathy, interpersonal skills and a genuine willingness to help. In fact, prosocial behavior and organizational citizenship behavior seem to be related to compassion as well. Compassion is a part of life as a response to organizational strife and needs, which can occur both within and be brought in from outside of the organization.

Compassionate responses often extend far beyond empathetic conversations, and can entail significant allocations of material and instrument resources directed toward persons in need. These elements also apply to how we might relate to our own needs, focusing on self-compassion, or to us growing more comfortable with receiving help and compassion from others.

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