Recent years have witnessed a growing interest in customer mistreatment in organizations. Much of this literature has focused on how individual employees cope with the mistreatment they experience. At the same time, there is a dearth of research on how organizations’ relational architectures can facilitate better organizational functioning in the midst of mistreatment. We address this limitation of the existing literature by focusing on the impact of organizations’ compassion networks. Specifically, we theorize that compassion network density facilitates employees’ aggregate sense of prosocial impact, especially when customer mistreatment is high. We further theorize that this enhanced sense of prosocial impact facilitates organizational citizenship behavior, pro-customer behavior, and customers’ store ratings. We test our model in a sample of 115 branches of a fast food franchise, including data from 115 leaders, over 1,000 employees, and customers’ online store ratings. Our findings show that compassion networks represent a promising avenue for mitigating customer mistreatment’s deleterious effects, and emphasize the benefits of examining compassion’s effects at the organizational level. Implications for theory and practice are discussed.
