Managing compassionately? Managerial narratives about grief and compassion

How do you manage a team following the death of an employee? This article explores this question and inquires if managerial responses to suffering can be compassionate with a decentralized team structure, in the restaurant industry where employees are faced with a high degree of emotional labour. To date, the compassion process has suggested that a focal actor, often a manager, first must notice suffering, then must feel empathic concern, and act in ways to alleviate a sufferer’s pain (Kanov et al., 2004). In this study, against the backdrop of the compassion process with a narrative approach and stories-as-text design, the findings articulate the material conditions that impede, disavow and inhibit the compassion process from the point of view of three restaurant managers acting as focal actors and their (rather unsuccessful) attempts to aid and alleviate the suffering of their grieving team members. By explicating the dynamics of their managerial failure using the link of grief and compassion, this article extends our understanding of grief at work and management in the restaurant industry more broadly.