Mitigating Burnout Through Compassionate Leadership: A Strategic Human Resource Management Approach

Muhamad Ridwan

Authors

Muhamad Ridwan STIE Ganesha

Keywords:

compasionate leadership, strategic hrm, employee burnout, regional workforce, phenomenology

Abstract

Occupational burnout has escalated into a critical institutional challenge, yet mainstream human resource management literature consistently overlooks the unique sosiogeographical factors that drive exhaustion within regional economic landscapes. This study aims to explore the lived experiences of formal employees in South Cianjur (Cianjur Selatan), West Java, focusing on how compassionate leadership and Strategic Human Resource Management (SHRM) practices interact to mitigate regional burnout. Employing a qualitative phenomenological research design, primary data was gathered through semi-structured in-depth interviews and Focus Group Discussions (FGD) with fifteen formal employees across diverse regional sectors. The gathered textual data was analyzed utilizing Braun and Clarke’s six-phase thematic analysis framework. The empirical findings reveal that regional burnout is heavily compounded by external infrastructural deficits and grueling daily commutes, which function as constant baseline job demands. While individual compassionate leadership serves as an immediate, vital psychosocial buffer against emotional draining, its effects remain temporary if decoupled from institutional frameworks. Sustainable burnout mitigation is only achieved when individual supervisor empathy is structurally aligned with flexible, region-adjusted SHRM infrastructures such as decentralized contingency protocols and adaptive Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).

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