Compassion Under Crisis: Sustaining Performance

ABSTRACT When crises disrupt normal functioning, what enables individuals and organizations to sustain performance over time? A substantial body of research across organizational behavior and crisis scholarship emphasizes psychological resilience as a key individual resource for coping with adversity. Yet whether compassion, understood as a response to suffering, contributes to performance under crisis alongside psychological resilience remains unclear. In this talk, we examine compassion during crisis within a psychological resilience-based framework, asking whether and how compassion and psychological resilience jointly shape performance outcomes. Drawing on survey data from 408 undergraduate students at the Technion collected during a period of sustained academic disruption, we analyze how compassion from faculty and psychological resilience jointly predict academic performance, above and beyond formal accommodations and economic hardship. The findings reveal a distinctive interplay between compassion and psychological resilience under crisis conditions. Compassion emerges as a robust correlate of sustained academic performance, while economic hardship remains a significant risk factor for poorer performance. Psychological resilience, by contrast, does not protect performance on its own; rather, it translates into maintained academic performance primarily when students experience compassionate engagement from faculty. These results suggest that compassion plays a distinct, context-shaping role during crises, with important implications for how universities respond to sustained disruption, and more broadly for how organizations can support performance under crisis conditions.