Psychological compassion climate: Examining the nomological network of perceptions of work group compassion

Organizational scholars have begun to focus on the pervasiveness of human suffering at work and the capacity of compassion to ease such suffering. Recent conceptual work has shifted from the individual to the group by positing compassion as a collective capacity that involves noticing others' suffering, feeling empathic concern, and attempting to alleviate that suffering. Drawing upon this foundation, the current paper elaborates on the theoretical concept of psychological compassion climate, defining it as the individual perception of shared norms around compassion within one's work group/unit, and develops and validates a brief measure to assess this construct. Specifically, in Study 1, we developed a new measure of psychological compassion climate and examined its nomological network, including theoretical antecedents, correlates, and consequences. In Study 2, we cross-validated the compassion climate measure using a time-separated design. In this study, psychological compassion climate assessed at Time 1 predicted improvements from Time 1 to Time 2 in three well-being indicators (i.e., anxiety, depressed mood, psychological flourishing) over a month-long span during the summer of 2020 at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic (when suffering of a variety of types was widespread). In addition, we also found that psychological compassion climate predicted compassion experiences at work over the one month interval, including compassion received from others as well as compassion given by the focal employees to others and to oneself.