Barriers to Compassion in Organizations: The Five Walls Research Reveals
- NVC Rising Platform Desk
- May 2
- 8 min read
The Five Barriers to Compassion in Organizations (And Why Empathy Training Alone Doesn't Work)
A 2025 peer-reviewed study set out to understand why compassion keeps failing inside organizations.
Not why people are unkind. Not why leaders have bad intentions. But why entire institutions, filled with decent people who genuinely want to treat each other well, keep reproducing the same patterns of harm, exclusion, and disconnection.
What Paakkanen, Martela, and Pessi found wasn't a leadership problem or a communication skills gap. They identified five interrelated barriers to compassion in organizations — five walls. And the most important finding wasn't the list itself. It was that these barriers are interdependent. Removing one without addressing the others doesn't work.
Explore the NVC Learning Community — where this systemic view is practiced, not just theorized.
What Are the Five Barriers to Compassion in Organizations?
The Paakkanen 2025 study identified five interrelated dimensions that block compassion in organizational settings:
Mindset — the underlying story about what organizations are for and how power works.
Behavior — the norms that govern daily interaction independent of individual intent.
Culture — the invisible “this is just how things work” patterns.
System — the formal structures of decision-making, accountability, and resource allocation.
Leadership — the role and conduct of those holding institutional authority.
What makes this finding significant: these barriers are interdependent. Single-lever interventions — empathy training alone, hiring kinder leaders alone, writing better values alone — fail because they leave the other walls intact.
The Research That Mainstream OD Hasn't Fully Reckoned With
You can run empathy training for six months. If the system still punishes vulnerability, the training evaporates. You can hire compassionate leaders. If the culture rewards individual performance over collective care, those leaders get worn down or pushed out. You can write beautiful values on the wall. If decision-making structures exclude most of the people in the building, the values are decoration.
NVC practitioners have been saying this for decades. The mainstream is now catching up — in peer-reviewed language, with data.
Wall One — Mindset: The Stories Organizations Carry
The first barrier is the story people carry about what organizations are for and how they work.
In domination-system logic, organizations are machines for producing output. People are resources. Relationships are means. Compassion is, at best, a nice-to-have and, at worst, a liability that clouds judgment and slows decisions.
This isn't cynicism. It's the deep grammar of most institutional structures. Performance reviews, productivity metrics, accountability frameworks — these encode a specific theory of human nature: that people need external incentives and consequences to function.
NVC names this directly. Marshall Rosenberg called it “domination-system thinking” — the assumption that some people are naturally above others, that power is rightfully held over people rather than with them, and that control is the proper response to uncertainty.
Shifting this mindset isn't a training outcome. It's a paradigm shift. And it has to happen before the other four walls can move.
Wall Two — Behavior: Norms That Override Intentions
Even when individuals hold values-aligned beliefs, behavior doesn't automatically follow. Organizations create behavioral norms that persist independent of individual intentions.
If every meeting starts with status performance rather than honest sharing, the person who breaks that norm pays a social cost. If feedback culture rewards sharp critique and treats expressed needs as weakness, people learn quickly what's safe to say and what isn't.
This is where NVC tools are most commonly deployed — and where they most often hit a ceiling. Teaching someone to use an observation-feeling-need-request format inside a meeting structure that was never designed for honest exchange is like teaching people to breathe deeply inside a burning building. Helpful. Not sufficient.
The behavioral wall comes down not when individuals practice new skills, but when the structures that govern daily interaction change. What gets rewarded. What gets challenged. What happens when someone expresses a need that costs something.
Wall Three — Culture: When Patterns Become Invisible
Culture is what happens when behavior patterns become invisible. When “that's just how things work here” replaces any conscious choice about how things could work.
Only 23% of employees globally are engaged at work. The latest Gallup data puts U.S. engagement at 31% in 2024 — the lowest in a decade. The cost of that disengagement: $8.8 trillion annually in lost productivity worldwide, or roughly 9% of global GDP.
The mainstream reads this as a motivation problem or a management problem. NVC reads it as a culture problem rooted in structure: when people have no real voice in decisions that affect them, when their needs are systematically unmet by the institution, and when the relational cost of honesty is too high, disengagement is the rational response.
Employees aren't failing to care. They're protecting themselves inside a structure that hasn't made it safe to care fully.
Culture change in the NVC sense isn't an initiative. It's not a new set of values or a rebranded HR program. It's the slow, often uncomfortable process of making it safe to name what's actually happening — and changing what happens next when someone does.
Wall Four — System: The Wall Most Change Work Refuses to Touch
This is the wall most organizational development work refuses to touch.
Systems are the formal structures: how decisions get made, who gets to make them, how conflict is handled, what accountability looks like, how resources are allocated, and what the consequences are for non-conformity.
The APA's 2024 Work in America Survey found that workers in high-psychological-safety environments still only report 50% participation in decision-making. Even in the best-measured workplace cultures, half of people are structurally excluded from power.
The system wall is where NVC's distinction between power-over and power-with becomes concrete. Power-with isn't a tone. It's not leaders who ask nicely before deciding. It's a structural redesign:
Consent-based decision-making
Transparent conflict processes
Accountability practices that hold behavior without dehumanizing people
Formal mechanisms that give voice to those closest to the impact of decisions
This is what Satya Nadella actually changed at Microsoft. He distributed Rosenberg's book to top executives, yes. But more than that, he changed what Microsoft rewarded, what kind of behavior the structure supported, and what the cultural norms around collaboration and knowledge-sharing became. The company's market value grew by over $250 billion in the years that followed. Nadella named empathy as the driver — but the vehicle was structural change.
Teaching people to communicate better inside an unchanged power structure doesn't shift the system wall. It can make people more comfortable inside it. Rosenberg was clear that this was not the goal. He cautioned against NVC becoming an analgesic that helped people tolerate unjust structures. The aim is to transform the structure.
The NVC Learning Community is built around this systemic view — not as theory, but as practice.
Wall Five — Leadership: The Most Visible, Most Misunderstood Wall
The fifth wall is the most visible and often the most misunderstood.
Organizations invest heavily in leadership development. The implicit theory is that better leaders create better cultures. There's partial truth in that. But the Paakkanen research is explicit: leadership barriers are one of five interdependent dimensions. Leaders who try to operate with compassion inside structures that don't support it burn out, get neutralized, or eventually conform.
NVC asks something specific of leaders: give up the thing that leadership in domination systems most rewards — the right to override. The shift from power-over to power-with is not primarily a communication change. It's a power change. It means leaders actually redistributing voice, decision-making authority, and accountability rather than simply performing accessibility.
That's a genuine cost. Naming it is part of what makes this framework trustworthy to people inside institutions, where they've seen enough “servant leadership” rebrands to know the difference between style and substance.
Signs Each Wall Is Standing in Your Organization
A diagnostic for practitioners and leaders. If several of these are true, that wall is intact.
Mindset is intact when:
People speak about employees as “resources” or “talent capital”
Decisions default to performance metrics over relational impact
Vulnerability is privately respected but publicly punished
Behavior is intact when:
Meetings start with status, not check-ins
Honest expression of need costs social capital
Conflict is avoided or escalated, rarely held openly
Culture is intact when:
Most people can predict what will be rewarded and what will be ignored
“That's just how it is here” is a frequent explanation
Engagement scores are stagnant despite annual interventions
System is intact when:
Decision-making is concentrated in a small group
Accountability is punitive, not relational
Information flows downward more than upward
Leadership is intact when:
Leaders perform accessibility without redistributing authority
“Servant leadership” language is in use but power structures haven't changed
Compassionate leaders burn out or quietly leave
Why Single-Lever Interventions Fail
The five-wall framework is useful not because it offers a checklist, but because it explains why single-lever interventions fail.
If your organization brings in NVC training and nothing else changes, you're working on the behavioral wall while the other four stay intact. The training will produce some individual shifts. The culture will absorb them.
If you redesign decision-making structures without shifting the underlying mindset, the new processes get used in old ways. People route around them. The spirit of power-with empties out of the form.
The organizations that have moved furthest are the ones that work all five walls simultaneously, slowly, with a tolerance for the discomfort of genuine power redistribution. A Dutch study across a school, an NGO, and a research institute found that NVC improved interpersonal dynamics and indirectly strengthened shared meaning and self-organization. Not one or the other. Both, together.
That's the systemic view. Interpersonal change and structural change don't happen in sequence. They happen in parallel, feeding each other, or they don't really happen at all.
How to Begin Working All Five Walls
A practical entry point, in order of leverage.
Start with mindset, but don't stop there. Reading Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication across leadership is a beginning, not an endpoint.
Audit behavior at the meeting level. What gets rewarded? What gets punished? Where does honest expression cost something?
Surface culture by making the invisible visible. Ask people what they don't say at work — and why. The answers map your culture wall.
Touch the system wall. Identify one decision currently held by a small group that could be redistributed. Start there. Power-with is built one structural redesign at a time.
Hold leaders accountable to redistribution, not performance. Leadership development that doesn't ask leaders to give up the right to override is leaving the most important wall standing.
FAQ
What are the five barriers to compassion in organizations?
According to the Paakkanen 2025 study, the five barriers are mindset, behavior, culture, system, and leadership. They are interdependent — addressing one without the others fails to produce sustainable change.
Why does empathy training fail in most organizations?
Empathy training works on the behavioral wall, but leaves the other four walls (mindset, culture, system, leadership) intact. When the system still punishes vulnerability and the culture rewards individual performance, training-based shifts evaporate within months.
What is the difference between power-over and power-with leadership?
Power-over leadership concentrates decision-making authority and uses control as the response to uncertainty. Power-with leadership distributes authority, builds consent-based decision-making, and treats accountability as relational rather than punitive. The shift requires structural change, not just communication training.
How does NVC apply to organizational change?
NVC offers both a diagnostic and a practice. Diagnostically, it names domination-system thinking as the underlying mindset that produces structural harm. Practically, it provides language and frameworks for redistributing voice, holding accountability without dehumanization, and building structures grounded in mutual consideration of needs.
What did Satya Nadella actually change at Microsoft?
Nadella distributed Rosenberg's Nonviolent Communication to top executives, but the deeper change was structural: what got rewarded, what kind of collaboration was supported, and how knowledge-sharing was handled. Microsoft's market value grew by over $250 billion in the years following — driven by structural shifts that empathy made possible, not empathy alone.
Can a single team or department work the five walls without organization-wide buy-in?
Partially. Teams can shift behavior and surface culture within their boundary. But system and leadership walls usually require organization-wide redesign. A team working in isolation often produces what Rosenberg warned against: making people more comfortable inside an unjust structure rather than transforming it.
How long does this kind of change take?
The organizations that have moved furthest measure progress in years, not quarters. The walls are interdependent — meaningful change is parallel and slow. The reward isn't speed. It's durability: change that doesn't evaporate when the consultant leaves.
Conclusion
The Paakkanen research converges with what NVC has been pointing to for decades: compassion in organizations isn't primarily a personal virtue. It's a structural condition.
The walls aren't just obstacles. They're a diagnostic. If compassion keeps failing in your organization, the question isn't how do we motivate people to care more? It's which walls are still standing, and what would it actually take to move them?
That's a harder question. It's also the right one.
Join the NVC Learning Community — where systemic change isn't a slogan, it's the practice ground.
Comments