The Consequence Of Self-Compassion:From An Observer’s Perspective

People may suffer from painful experiences such as setbacks and difficulties in work and life,and the pressure of life and work is increasing.Regardless of the unfortunate experiences from work or non-work areas,they may increase employees’pressure and lead to negative emotions and counterproductive work behaviors in workplaces,which are harmful to organizational performance.More and more management researchers and practitioners are introducing self-compassion as an important intervention for employees to rebound from frustration and adversity.Self-compassion refers to treating oneself kindly,patiently and understandingly after experiencing setbacks,failures and difficulties that cause pain.A large number of empirical studies have found that self-compassion can bring positive effects to employees in many aspects.However,there is still research gap in the existing literature on self-compassion.The current attention to self-compassion focuses on the actor,exploring the beneficial consequences of the actor’s self-compassion,but there is no research on self-compassion from the perspective of the observer,and there has been less explorations of positive interpersonal outcomes.In fact,although self-compassion can enhance the motivation of employees to positively respond to setbacks or stress,in many cases,employees need to get help from their colleagues to overcome these setbacks or stresses.So this paper has explored from the perspective of observers how colleagues’ self-compassion affects employees’interpersonal helping behavior towards these colleagues.Based on dispositional attribution theory and research on empathic concern,this paper suggests that observing colleagues’ self-compassion has a profound influence on employees’interpersonal helping behaviors through the cognitional mechanism of trait-resilience dispositional attribution and the affect mechanism of empathic concern.Observing colleagues’self-compassion makes employees think that the collegues have high trait-resilience,thus they are willing to help them out of the difficulties and relieve their pressure.At the same time,observing colleagues’ self-compassion is likely to trigger employees’ empathic concern,which motivates them to help the self-compassionate collegues.This paper used online questionnaire survey method through Sojump.com platform to collect data from 172 employees of various industries and enterprises in eastern provinces of China and analyzed sample data with Mplus8.3 and SPSS20 software to test the research hypotheses.The conclusions are as follows:When observing colleagues’ self-compassion,employees will attribute colleagues’ self-compassion to their trait-resilience,and then actively perform interpersonal helping towards the colleagues;When observing colleagues’ self-compassion,employees will feel empathic concern towards colleagues,which further promotes employees to conduct interpersonal helping behaviors towards self-compassionate colleagues suffering from unfortunate experiences.Theoretically,this paper extends the study of self-compassion to the perspective of observer,and finds that self-compassion can bring help from colleagues,and further verifies the positive effects of self-compassion in interpersonal relationships.Practically,the findings of this study can encourage individual employees and managers to apply self-compassion to cope with stress and frustration.