Compassionate Communication in the Workplace: Exploring Processes of Noticing, Connecting, and Responding

Abstract

This research contributes to the growing body of literature exploring emotion and communication in the workplace by considering the workers in a variety of jobs that require “compassionate communication.” Compassion is conceptualized as one form of emotional work and is theoretically developed through a model that highlights the subprocesses of noticing, feeling, and responding. Analyses of interviews with 23 workers in a wide range of human service jobs indicated a number of complexities in the communication of compassion in the workplace. Processes of “noticing” included both noticing the need for compassion and noticing details of clients’ lives in order to communicate more successfully in compassionate ways. Processes of “connecting” included both emotional processes (empathy) and cognitive processes (perspective taking). Processes of “responding” included both nonverbal strategies, such as immediacy behaviors and environmental structuring, and verbal strategies for balancing the informational and emotional content of messages. These results are interpreted in the light of both contemporary and traditional communication theory, and practical implications are presented for human service workers and others involved in compassionate communication in the workplace.

Keywords:

• Compassion
• Emotion
• Empathy
• Human Services

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank Dawn Atkins, Bonnie Creel, and Dan Ryan for their assistance in this research.

Notes

1. For examples of specific research projects emphasizing the emotional labor concept, see Ashforth and Humphrey (1993), Leidner (1999), Murphy (1998), Shuler and Sypher (2000), Steinberg and Figart (1999), Sutton (1991), Tracy (2000), and Tracy and Tracy (1998).

2. This distinction regarding occupational types associated with emotional labor and emotional work provides a helpful heuristic in distinguishing the two concepts. However, it should be clear that the distinction is not a necessary and sufficient one. Clearly, human service workers often perform emotional labor (e.g., putting on specific emotional displays required for patients; see Morgan & Krone, 2001), and front-line service workers often feel emotions as a natural outgrowth of their work, not just the emotions “required” by management. The key conceptual distinctions between emotional labor and emotional work revolve around the authenticity of the emotion and the extent to which the emotion is prescribed by management (for a critique of the authenticity concept, see Tracy & Tretheway, 2005).

3. Our goal in selecting interviewees was to enhance the theoretical and pragmatic richness of our consideration of compassionate communication through the consideration of multiple human service occupations. Although some of our interviewees were known to us before the research, the majority were not, and were instead contacted through snowball techniques or through calling relevant social service and human service organizations to solicit interview subjects.

4. The complete initial coding guide is available from the author upon request

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Katherine I. Miller

Katherine Miller is a Professor and Director of Graduate Studies in the Department of Communication at Texas A&M University