Nothing more than Feelings? From Individual Compassion to Systemic Compassion in Modern Organizations

Abstract

Suffering and compassion in modern organizations have increasingly developed into a relevant topic in management literature. This approach considers compassion as a personal attitude that prompts a reaction to the suffering of other persons. We argue that this assumption entails epistemological obstacles that prevent a better understanding of the relationship between suffering and compassion. From the perspective of the theory of self-referential social systems we unfold the obstacles and discuss how to overcome them. We call our model systemic compassion and sustain that compassion in modern organizations is not only a personal feeling, but also a communicatively developed structure of expectations that must precede every concrete episode of personal suffering to successfully deal with it.