Compaixão e liderança benevolente nas organizações: um estudo comparado em empresas brasileiras e italianas

Abstract

The organizations are spaces where life happens in its natural and genuine expression and, consequently, the search for realization is also present. As the joy, the pain and suffering, coming from the personal, family and organizational relations, become present in the professional daily life. The compassion in the organizations can be understand as a processed developed by the perception of the pain in the work environment, followed by the collective response to the pain, with the intention of softening, reaching the actions directed by the leaders in the quest for overcoming this suffering. In this context, the concept of benevolent leadership has a mobilizing power in the search of the common good and in the attention to the globality of the lives of those led. The purpose of this article is developing a leadership model to compassive organization, from the analysis of the relation between benevolent leadership and compassion in Italian and Brazilian companies. This is an exploratory-descriptive type of research, using the mix method, through an explanatory sequential project that integrates qualitative and quantitative research. A survey had been applied with employees from two Brazilian companies and from two Italian companies, both from plastic segment, followed by in-depth interviews and content analysis with business leaders. The obtained results confirmed that compassion is a social process that has origin in the expression of suffering by those led and is confirmed in the corresponding care triggered by the leaders' actions. The research also revealed the underlying and structural dimensions for both compassion and leadership. These dimensions indicate the attributes of benevolent leadership which, once identified and examined in the research, enabled the construction of a conceptual framework of Benevolent Leadership for Compassionate Organizations.