We asked 32 professionals what organizational compassion is to them. Analysis of the responses revealed four conflicting, if not paradoxical, dimensions. With insight from Habermas' theory of 'communicative action', we paired these dimensions as two lifeworld/system couples: (1) selfless compassion (lifeworld) and strategic compassion (system), as well as (2) interpersonal compassion (lifeworld) and institutional compassion (system). While the colonisation of the lifeworld by system dimensions is a legitimate Habermasian concern, our analysis highlights the potential for system to magnify the power of compassion beyond lifeworld contexts, leveraging and transcending lifeworld/system tensions, aided by dialogue as 'communicative action'. Keywords Compassion, organization, organizational behaviour, Habermas harmonised. We accordingly turn to Habermas's theory of 'communicative action' as an analytical lens. Scholars such as Cooper and Burrell (1988) and Burrell (1994) describe Habermas' (1987) project of synthesising philosophy and empirical social science as invaluable to organizational theorists needing to defend and transcend the dual competing objectives of modern performativity with post-modern emancipation, the latter described managerially as "freeing employees from unnecessarily alienating forms of work organization" (Alvesson & Willmot, 1992, p. 433). Scherer and Palazzo (2007, p. 1097) similarly describe Habermas' project as an approach "in which both forms of coordination-ethical discourse and economic bargaining-are taken into account". We analyse our findings with insight from an adaptation of Habermas' (1987) theory of 'communicative action', which sees dialogue as the ultimate expression of human potential and as a means of transcending competing tensions (Habermas, 1996). We structure the paper as follows. We initially review the literature, considering current and past theorising, revealing organizational compassion as a highly contested topic involving competing views: as both an individual virtue as well as a strategic institutional practice, as both irrational and rational, as feminine and masculine, and as having both internal and external targets. We also justify our adaptation and use of Habermas' theory of coordinated communication as our analytical lens and follow up by describing our methodology and analytical frame. In our discussion, we consider possibilities for navigating apparent contradictions in various conceptualisations of organizational compassion through an ongoing Habermasian process of dialogue and coordinated action, where apparent contradictions are reframed as potentially complementary, synergistic and energising. Our paper contributes to the organizational compassion literature by providing broader theorising of organizational compassion, problematizing assumed oppositions and suggesting means for integrating and transcending them.
