The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science

Compassion involves noticing another’s need, empathizing, and acting to enhance their well-being. In response to another’s pain, the motivation is to increase hedonic well-being or the absence of pain. In response to another’s desire to grow, the motivation is to increase eudaimonic well-being or helping them develop. We argue that compassion includes both. Our expanded view suggests that coaching with compassion will lead to desired change, enhanced health, and well-being. We propose a model saying coaching with compassion invokes a psychophysiological state that enables a person to be open to new possibilities and learning. In contrast, coaching for compliance (i.e., toward how the coach or the organization believe the person should act) and deficiency-based coaching invoke the opposite state—resulting in a person being defensive, reducing cognitive functioning. We theorize how coaching with compassion can enhance adaptability of the organization through creating norms and relationships of caring and development.

Recent studies show that the relationship between structure and inertia in changing environments may be more complex than previously held and that the theoretical logics tying inertia with flexibility and efficiency remain incomplete. Using a computational model, this article aims to clarify this relationship by exploring what structural properties enable continuous change in inertia-generating organizations and what their performance consequences are in dynamic environments. The article has three main findings: First, employing managers who anticipate change is not enough to generate continuous change; it is also necessary to raise both the rate of responsiveness and desired performance. Second, continuous change increases average organizational performance and reduces its variation. Third, organizations’ capacity for continuous change is counterintuitively limited by the organizations’ capacity to build inertia. These are important insights, because they suggest that with the right design, organizations may be both more flexible and reliable than commonly believed.

The success of organizational change increasingly depends on employees taking personal responsibility for change through effective adaptation to changing conditions and proactive anticipation of new challenges. In this study, we examined how work context features influence the change-oriented behaviors of adaptivity and proactivity in the workplace. We proposed several direct and moderating effects of job context variables on adaptive and proactive behaviors. We used a multilevel design and a unique data set with 621 special education teachers embedded in 157 urban public schools to test our hypotheses. Our analyses show that adaptive and proactive behaviors are distinct aspects of job performance during organizational change and that different job features have distinct direct and moderating effects on these behaviors. Our results provide insights into how leaders of change efforts can create a work context that encourages employees to actively participate in the change process.

This article explores the relationship between the interpersonal skills required by professional actors and those required by organization development (OD) practitioners. The objective is not to turn OD practitioners into actors but rather to indicate what might be a useful source of skill development for OD professionals. Although the end uses for the skill sets diverge, the skills themselves seem similar if not the same, especially the foundational skills of self-awareness, listening, and observing. Traditional methods of learning interpersonal skills may only address traditional OD problems that require diagnostic, positivistic control of behavior change. However, acting training such as improvisational techniques may develop more advanced skills such as reciprocity and collaborating, which are needed to practice dialogic forms of OD grounded in postmodern premises of shared meaning making, multiple realities, and collaborative solutions as proposed by Bushe and Marshak.