Turning strain into gain: leveraging manager compassion to promote team innovation and customer satisfaction in response to teams’ emotional exhaustion

Although emotional exhaustion is generally regarded as a threat to individual and team functioning, research on the effects of team emotional exhaustion is scant and inconsistent. The present research offers a novel perspective on the implications of team emotional exhaustion for team innovation and customer satisfaction. By integrating conservation of resources theory and the literature on compassion, we identified manager compassion, reflecting managers’ engagement with teammates’ suffering and actions aimed at relieving it, as a moderator of the relations among teams’ emotional exhaustion, team innovation, and customers’ service satisfaction. Using hierarchical linear modelling, the results of a three-wave multisource study conducted on 56 retail stores of a consumer electronics and household appliances company showed that manager compassion strengthened the positive relationship between team emotional exhaustion and team innovation and between team innovation and customer satisfaction with teams’ services. The team emotional exhaustion-team innovation-customer satisfaction chain of relationships was also stronger when managers exhibited high levels of compassion. A post-hoc multisource study on 38 units of a healthcare centre further supported the moderating role of manager compassion between team emotional exhaustion and team innovation. We discuss the theoretical and practical implications of these findings.