Top executive leaders' compassionate actions: An integrative framework of compassion incorporating a confucian perspective.

This paper sets out to develop a theoretical framework for understanding compassion. It contributes to the research of compassion from an indigenous theory perspective to complement the Western theory of this important topic. We do this by adopting self-cultivation, a Confucian indigenous theoretical perspective based on xin (mind-heart) to guide our grounded study and thus develop an integrative framework. With an analysis based on extensive interviews with top executive leaders in Chinese enterprises, we thus show that (1) integrating compassion and self-cultivation enriches our understanding of the moral growth of compassion; (2) compassion affects performance outcomes at the individual, relational, and organizational levels; and (3) self-cultivation and compassion have an ultimate interaction effect on organizational performance outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]