Compassion towards clients: Providing conceptual clarity and a test on its damaging effect on frontline workers Emma Ropes July 2020 Utrecht School of Governance, Utrecht University Master thesis for ‘Research in Public Administration and Organizational Science’ First supervisor: dr. NoortJe de Boer Second supervisor: prof. dr. Lars Tummers Keywords: compassion, public service delivery, emotional exhaustion, factor analysis, SEM 1 Abstract Despite its argued importance for the quality of public service, compassion is not yet an integrated research topic in public administration. The main purpose of this study was to gain more understanding on what frontline workers’ compassion towards client entails. It did so by first providing conceptual clarity on frontline workers’ compassion towards clients, and, second, by testing the damaging effects of experiencing compassion towards clients on the wellbeing of frontline workers. Using a factor analysis with data collected on social workers through a survey (n = 849), this study showed that compassion is a distinct emotion from emphatic distress, and that compassion has two underlying dimensions: emphatic concern and compassionate motivation. Second, the study points out that the dimensions of compassion have opposite effects on a frontline worker’s wellbeing: while compassionate motivation is negatively related to emotional exhaustion, emphatic concern is positively related to emotional exhaustion and mediated by working overtime to help clients. Altogether, this study showed that compassion is a more complex construct and potentially damaging emotion than is often proposed and hopes to encourage fellow researchers to continue to gain more understanding on compassion and its essential role for the public service and for the effect it can have on the wellbeing of frontline workers. 2 Introduction Frontline workers such as police officers, social workers and physicians are confronted with clients who often reach out in a time of need and distress (Lipsky 2010) and are assigned to deliver the adequate service needed (Zacka 2017). During this public service delivery, scholars emphasize the importance of frontline workers experiencing compassion towards their clients (e.g. Eldor 2018; Strauss et al 2016) as compassion is believed to contribute substantially to the quality of public service (e.g. Hsieh, Yang and Fu 2011). Compassion is understood as the feeling that arises in witnessing another’s suffering and that motivates a subsequent desire to help and alleviate suffering (Goetz, Keltner, and Simon-Thomas 2010). Compassion is treated as one of the public service values (Kernaghan 2003) and it is argued that it should be emphasized as such in the public service ethos (Hsieh Yang Fu 2011). Compassion would, for example, bring frontline workers closer to their clients and allow them to establish a connection with them (Cassel 2002). Despite its argued importance for the quality of public service, public administration scholars have rarely pursued the concept of compassion as a research end itself (Eldor 2018), although it has been gradually incorporating emotive aspects such as emotional labor (e.g. Guy and Newman 2013) or emotional intelligence (e.g. Vigoda-Gadot and Meisler 2010) into its theorizing. Public administration scholars that do make use of the concept of compassion often relegate it to a mere supporting role in which the concept remains undefined and unexplored (Eldor 2018). An illustrative example of this can be found in the literature on public service motivation (PSM), in which compassion is treated as one of the dimensions underlying it (Perry 1996). When going through the PSM literature, it becomes apparent that scholars use compassion as one of the underlying dimensions to measure PSM, but do not go into what compassion entails or how it should be measured. The limited role of compassion in the public 3 administration literature is quite surprising given that values as sensibility, respect and responsiveness are becoming more of a priority to public service organizations (Kernaghan 2011; Vigoda-Gadot and Meiri 2008; Hsieh 2014), together with an increased focus on ethical guidelines including values as caring, tolerance and humanity (Kernaghan 2003; Christensen and Lægreid 2011) – all values that are inherently embedded in compassion (Eldor 2018). Gaining more understanding on what frontline workers’ compassion towards their clients entails, is thus an important research path to follow – and this is where this study comes in. The first goal of this study is to provide conceptual clarity on the concept of compassion, which is needed because of the current lack of consensus on its conceptualization and operationalization (Klimecki and Singer 2011). A large source of this unclarity stems from the often-overlooked distinction between compassion and emphatic distress. Both are understood to be types of an individual’s emotional response to anticipated or observed suffering (Lamothe et al. 2014). Compassion entails a cognitive differentiation between the other and yourself and a feeling of emphatic concern, which subsequently leads to the motivation to help alleviate the suffering of others (Klimecki and Singer 2011). Emphatic distress on the other hand entails a process whereby the self-other distinction becomes blurred as the observer is overwhelmed by the experience of negative emotions (Gilbert et al. 2017; Goetz et al. 2010), leading to feelings of personal distress and attempts to withdrawal from helping the sufferer (Klimecki and Singer 2011). Confusing compassion and emphatic distress could have problematic consequences for a frontline worker and the quality of the service s/he provides, as the first leads to the desired behavior of wanting to help and the second to the non-desired and even troubling behavior of wanting to withdrawal from helping. Another reason for why it is important to distinguish between compassion and emphatic distress is to prevent future research on compassion from having distorted outcomes when emphatic distress and compassion are confused. While some 4 scholars are starting to recognize the difference between compassion and emphatic distress (Goetz et al 2010; Atkins and Parker 2012), many do not differentiate between them, or seem to confuse the terms. Therefore, as stated above, the first goal of this study is to provide conceptual clarity on compassion and its difference with emphatic distress. It will do so by using an explanatory (n1 = 427) and confirmatory (n2 = 422) factor analysis, which allow for the investigation and comparison of the psychometric properties of both concepts. The second goal of this study concerns the effect of compassion on the wellbeing of frontline workers. As described earlier, compassion is believed to contribute to the quality of public service. Based on this, it would be logical for public service organizations to be recruiting frontline workers with high levels of compassion and should stimulate it in employed frontline workers. However, it is also plausible to believe that compassion has a negative effect on the wellbeing of frontline workers. The reason for this is that the possibility of being able to help clients is not always present during public service delivery, which can lead to discouragement, frustration and burnout (KJeldsen and Jacobsen 2012; Van Loon et al. 2015). The difficulty of helping clients is especially apparent in public service context. Due to red tape (KJeldsen and Jacobsen 2012) and extensive workloads (Tummers et al. 2015) frontline workers may not always have the resources to help clients (Zacka 2017). In addition, many frontline workers are employed at people-changing organizations, which are known for their difficulty in regard to indicators of change and their difficulty in seeing any real signs of success (Carlson 1979; Hasenfeld 1983). The painful reality of experiencing compassion and the associated motivation to help clients, but not being able to do so or failing to see results, can take its toll (KJeldsen and Jacobsen 2012) and lead to emotional exhaustion. In addition, frontline workers might believe that by investing more time in helping clients, they can provide them with the adequate support to see signs of success. This can result in working overtime to help clients; a behavioral 5 coping mechanism in which frontline workers cope with stress by using their own time to benefit clients (Tummers and Musheno 2015). However, this coping strategy could lead to even more emotional exhaustion as it might lead to an overreaching of mental and physical resources (Van Loon 2015) and to additional frustration, as the efforts made by working overtime to help clients will not necessarily be rewarded. It is important to focus on these potential damaging aspects of compassion, as prior studies almost solely focus on the beneficial effects of compassion. Those studies link compassion towards clients to beneficial wellbeing outcomes such as improved well-being and mental health (e.g. Frederickson et al. 2008; Singer and Klimecki 2014). However, as argued above, compassion can be psychologically damaging when the goal of helping a client cannot be achieved. Protecting public servants from these potential costs of compassion is be especially important given the high level of burnout of many public servants in the public service workplace (Eldor 2018). The second goal of this study is thus to answer the following research question: ‘What is the effect of compassion on emotional exhaustion