Academic Conference on Good Business

Organizations with a Human Face: Employee-Centric Identity and Philanthropic Disaster Response

Recent research shows that compassion within organizations may be inherently otherinterested, as opposed to purely self interested. This other-interested understanding of compassion within organizations may allow for an other-interested understanding of compassionate responses to suffering outside the organization as well. We use the case of corporate responses to humanitarian disasters to explore the “human focus” of organizational identity as a driver of externally-directed organizational compassion. Presenting quantitative and qualitative research on corporate philanthropic responses to the 2004 South Asian tsunami and the 2005 Kashmiri earthquake, we find that organization-internal and organization-external dimensions of identity interact to predict the likelihood of engaging in humanitarian disaster response, and that the role of identity appears to be moderated by the salience of the event. Our study extends the literature on organizational compassion, adding to our conceptualization of the human aspect of organizations and of corporate philanthropy, with implications for our understanding of the role of organizations in society.