Trust as a precondition for compassionate leadership: a discourse analytical perspective

Abstract

This paper examines how trust shapes the enactment and retrospective evaluation of compassionate leadership through the analysis of leaders’ real-time retrospective negotiations. Through interactional analysis of leadership meetings in a Turkish manufacturing firm, it shows that compassionate leadership is a relational practice that carries reputational and organisational risk when trust-based compassionate acts do not produce the expected response. More specifically, the paper examines how business partners retrospectively negotiate responsibility after one of the founders’ compassionate act results in perceived betrayal, financial loss and reputational vulnerability. The study adopts an ethnographically informed qualitative design and analyses naturally occurring workplace interaction from strategic meetings between business partners. Using interactional sociolinguistic tools, the paper examines how participants collaboratively reconstruct the incident, assign blame, manage face, and renegotiate expectations regarding appropriate leadership conduct and future trust relations. The findings show that while trust acts as a precondition of showing compassion, when this retrospectively proves misplaced it may transform compassion into perceived managerial weakness or naivety. Although the founder explicitly constructs himself as compassionate and well-intentioned, colleagues partially attribute responsibility to him for trusting the employee, thereby questioning his managerial judgement and symbolic authority. The analysis demonstrates that compassionate leadership involves not only emotional labour, but also interpersonal, reputational, and organisational risk when trust proves misplaced. The paper makes a theoretical contribution to literature, by integrating trust into the compassion process and conceptualising it as a central element of compassionate appraisal.