RT Article
T1 Methods of Mitigating the Paradox of Compassion in the Organizational Behavior of Government Employees: A Case of Animal Protection Agencies in Taiwan
JF Cultural and religious studies
VO 8
IS 5
SP 255
OP 273
A1 Wu, Chuang-Hsien
A1 Tsai, Ya-Chuan
LA English
PB David Publishing Company
YR 2020
UL https://www.ixtheo.de/Record/1842685422
AB According to psychologists, for workers whose job is to help others, their quality of service is improved if they have compassion. However, compassion potentially produces the side effect of compassion fatigue, which decreases service quality. According to sociologists, professionals who must interact with animals, such as veterinarians or butchers adopt the role of a "gate-keeper". Specifically, these professionals are troubled by the conflict between compassion and the faithful execution of the law. This conflict induces, in them, harmful behavior toward the animals. To verify these arguments, we empirically investigated government employees in a Taiwanese animal protection agency. Results from structural equation modeling indicate that although compassion toward animals can increase discretionary effort and mitigate ethics exhaustion, compassion fatigue weakened the factors mitigating ethics exhaustion, which increased harm toward the animals. Therefore, to relieve compassion fatigue, the workload of government employees must be reduced.
K1 Compassion
K1 Compassion fatigue
K1 Gate-Keeper
K1 Structural Equation Modeling
DO 10.17265/2328-2177/2020.05.001