Impacts of Compassion On Focal Actors’ and Sufferers’ Well-being: the Role of Self-serving and Other-oriented Motivations

Abstract

Despite the increasing scholarly attention on compassion at work, the various motivations accompanying compassionate acts and the corresponding impacts on the focal actor’s (i.e., the person doing compassion) and the sufferer’s experience and well-being have been overlooked. To address the question of how focal actor’s motivation relates to the focal actor’s and the sufferer’s experiences and well-being (e.g., felt meaningfulness, job stress, giving to others, felt emotional support, recovery related self-efficacy), we examine self-serving (e.g., fulfill job expectations, seek incentives, avoid punishments, and desire to improve reputation) and other-oriented motivations (e.g., alleviate the sufferer’s suffering, benefit the broader community/organization) as well as the levels of authenticity in the compassionate process. We adopt the between-subject experimental design. Participants are randomly assigned to one of the two conditions (self-serving vs. other-orientation). Specifically, in experiment 1, with data collected from mTurk, we examine how focal actors’ self-reported motivation—self-serving and other-oriented—accompanying the act of compassion relates to their felt meaningfulness at work. In experiment 2, we examine how sufferers’ perceptions of focal actors’ motivations—self-serving, other-oriented, and authenticity—accompanying the act of compassion relate to the sufferers’ experien