Fostering Sustainable Workplace Through Leaders’ Compassionate Behaviors: Understanding the Role of Employee Well-Being and Work Engagement

Martina Pansini (), Ilaria Buonomo and Paula Benevene
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Martina Pansini: Department of Human Sciences, LUMSA University, 00193 Rome, Italy
Ilaria Buonomo: Department of Human Sciences, LUMSA University, 00193 Rome, Italy
Paula Benevene: Department of Human Sciences, LUMSA University, 00193 Rome, Italy

Sustainability, 2024, vol. 16, issue 23, 1-16

Abstract: Social sustainability in organizations refers to fostering well-being, inclusion, and the development of supportive relationships that enhance individual well-being and collective resilience. This study explores the relationship between compassionate leadership and work engagement, focusing on the mediating role of employee well-being. Compassionate leaders actively engage with their followers’ needs, offering emotional support and practical help and aligning with social sustainability principles by promoting positive workplace outcomes and fostering a supportive environment. Despite compassionate leadership having generated growing interest, very few studies have adopted a quantitative approach to examining its specific effects on employee outcomes, creating a significant gap in the literature specifically concerning how compassionate leadership affects employee engagement or additional variables, such as employee well-being. Framed in the Job Demands-Resources (JD-R) Model, our study addresses this gap by examining whether compassionate leadership can serve as a job resource by increasing work engagement through employee well-being as a personal resource. The study was carried out on a sample of 225 Spanish workers, and the data were examined through a structural equation model (SEM) to test the proposed model. The results showed a good model fit to the data, showing that well-being acts as a key mediator in the relationship between compassionate leadership and job engagement. Although we did not find a direct association between compassionate leadership and engagement, we found that compassionate behaviors significantly improve employee well-being, which in turn promotes higher engagement. These results extend the JD-R model by demonstrating that leaders’ compassionate leadership can serve as a job resource, contributing to a supportive and socially sustainable workplace.

Keywords: compassionate leadership; work engagement; employee well-being; social sustainability; sustainable workplace; personal resources; job resources; JD-R Model (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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