Compassion in the Clink: When and How Human Services Workers Overcome Barriers to Care
Katherine A. DeCelles () and
Michel Anteby ()
Additional contact information
Katherine A. DeCelles: Rotman School of Management, University of Toronto, Toronto, Ontario M5S 3E6, Canada
Michel Anteby: Questrom School of Business, Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts 02215
Organization Science, 2020, vol. 31, issue 6, 1408-1431
Abstract:
A key assumption in past literature has been that human services workers become emotionally distant from their charges (such as clients or patients). Such distancing is said to protect workers from the emotionally draining aspects of the job but creates challenges to feeling and behaving compassionately. Because little is known about when and how compassion occurs under these circumstances, we conducted a multiphased qualitative study of 119 correctional officers in the United States using interviews and observations. Officers’ accounts and our observations of their interactions with inmates included cruel, disciplinary, unemotional, and compassionate treatment. Such treatment varied by the situations that officers faced, and compassion was surprisingly common when inmates were misbehaving—challenging current understanding of the occurrence of compassion at work. Examining officers’ accounts more closely, we uncovered a novel way that we theorize human services workers can be compassionate, even under such difficult circumstances. We find that officers describe engaging in practices in which they (a) relate to others by leveling group-based differences between themselves and their charges and (b) engage in self-protection by shielding themselves from the negative emotions triggered by their charges. We posit that the combined use of such practices offsets different emotional tensions in the work, rather than only providing emotional distance, and in doing so, can foster compassionate treatment under some of the most trying situations and organizational barriers to compassion.
Keywords: compassion; emotion; affect; human services; prison; correctional officers (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2020
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)
Downloads: (external link)
https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2020.1358 (application/pdf)
Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.
Export reference: BibTeX
RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan)
HTML/Text
Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:inm:ororsc:v:31:y:2020:i:6:p:1408-1431
Access Statistics for this article
More articles in Organization Science from INFORMS Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Chris Asher ().