Individual Compassion Leading to Employees’ Performance: An Empirical Study from Pakistan

Abstract

In social sciences “compassion” is considered as an impactful attribute of employees’ satisfaction and wellbeing. People demonstrate compassion for others in socially interacting environments like an organization. As organizational people interact with each other therefore they show compassion towards each other. In such a manner compassion becomes an attribute of organizational culture if organizations themselves promote and support compassion at workplace. Compassion being a source of employee satisfaction may increase his/her performance or may divert employee’s attention from task accomplishment. This possibility has inspired this study to empirically test the effect of compassion at workplace on employees’ performance. Moreover, an indirect effect of compassion through intrinsic motivation on performance is also tested in this study to elaborate how compassion at workplace intrinsically motivates employees to enhance their performance. To test these relationships, data from 94 respondents have been analyzed quantitatively. The findings of the study supported that compassion enhances employee-performance, specifically the contextualperformance. Moreover, intrinsic motivation also moderates compassion-performance relationship. Compassion at workplace even enhances employees’ task-performance when moderated by intrinsic motivation. This study provided empirical evidence that compassion at workplace can enhance employee-performance; contextual as well as task-performance.