Suffering is fundamental to human experience. Often it is triggered by such events as illness, accidents, death, or the breakdown of relationships. As organizations are places of human engagement, they are invariably places that harbour feelings of joy and pain and reactions of callousness or compassion in response to another's suffering (Dutton et al., 2002). The emotional and social cost of human suffering in organizations includes loss of work confidence, self-esteem, and health; as well as toxic relations involving reduced employee cooperation (Frost, 1999; 2003). The financial and social cost is astronomical, even in the wealthiest nations on earth (Margolis and Walsh, 2003). Awareness of the power of compassion to lessen and alleviate human pain (Kanov et al.. 2004; Lilius et al., 2008) has led to growing interest in compassion in organizations under the banner of Positive Organizational Scholarship (POS). Compassion is defined by POS scholars as a three-fold process of noticing another person's suffering, feeling empathy, and responding in some way to alleviate the pain (Dutton et al., 2006; Frost et al., 2006). Human resource departments in organizations that strive to be compassionate actively promote compassion both by encouraging compassionate co-worker relations, establishing systems and policies to ensure that employees' pain is recognized, acknowledged, and responded to with compassion, and by developing compassionate leadership.

Compassion can be expressed towards others at all levels of social relations - colleagues of equal hierarchical status, junior employees, as well as senior supervisors. When the dog of a senior supervisor at MHS was diagnosed with cancer, her staff showed great compassion by enquiring about her pet's welfare and listening each day as she revealed greater detail of the illness as well as 'happy' stories from her healthy days (Dutton et al., 2007). When the supervisor called in one day to say she would be late as her dog had just passed away, the staff made a collection and sent flowers. Sharing such a moving experience brought them all closer together as friends beyond their professional roles.....

Questions 

1. Describe the HR approach used by MHS and Cisco. 

2. How was compassion embedded within MHS and Cisco? 

3. What might be the result, in terms of positive psychological capital, of the HR approaches used in this case?