A recent business conversation left me thinking about a word we use easily: care. I was trying to get to the facts of a cash-flow problem. The conversation shifted toward whether taking time to meet with me demonstrated that someone cared.
There is value in showing up. But when a practical obligation is unresolved, a meeting still needs to address that obligation. A person can leave feeling heard and remain in exactly the same financial position.
I needed an accurate accounting of an obligation and a concrete next step. Was the work planned and performed accurately? What was owed? What would happen next? An assurance of care could not answer those questions by itself.
I pay attention to where people put their time and money. Those choices often reveal priorities. Yet neither measure, by itself, gives a complete account of care. Research gives us a more specific vocabulary for understanding what people feel, what they do, and how their actions are experienced.
Here is the working definition I find useful: care means taking another person’s well-being seriously enough to understand the need, act responsibly within your role and ability, and remain accountable for the effects of your actions.
That is my synthesis for care in practice. Research studies several related concepts, including compassion, responsiveness, commitment, and trust. They are not interchangeable, and none gives us a scientific test of another person’s private motives.
What researchers can measure
Psychologists Jennifer Goetz, Dacher Keltner, and Emiliana Simon-Thomas describe compassion as a feeling elicited by another person’s suffering that motivates a desire to help. The concern matters, even before help occurs. But wanting to help and providing effective help remain different things. [1]
Harry Reis and colleagues study perceived responsiveness: the experience of another person understanding us, valuing important aspects of who we are, and caring about our welfare. In this research, caring includes a willingness to attend to the other person’s needs, alongside warmth and concern. Understanding, validation, and caring are the central elements. That makes responsiveness a useful basis for examining how care is experienced. [2] [8]
Dev Crasta and colleagues developed and validated the Perceived Responsiveness and Insensitivity Scale. Its 16 items ask people to rate experiences such as whether another person “really listened to me,” “was attentive to my needs,” or “took my concerns seriously.” The authors report validation in romantic, friendship, and family relationships. [3]
Those answers measure the recipient’s perceptions. They are valuable evidence about an experience; they are not an independent audit of the other person’s behavior. A favorable score cannot establish that a bill was paid or a plan was accurate. Business claims also need records, specific commitments, and evidence of what happened.
A different field supplies another useful perspective. Shane Sinclair and colleagues interviewed 53 advanced cancer inpatients receiving palliative care. Their qualitative model described compassion as a response that addresses suffering and needs through relational understanding and action. In the Discussion, the authors report that participants identified compassion as a disposition requiring action. They distinguish this from empathy understood as an emotional state that need not lead to helping. These patients’ accounts informed a model of health care; they did not establish a universal test for every relationship. [4]
My practical inference from these lines of research is that care should be considered from both sides: the person offering it and the person receiving it. Concern, respectful attention, and useful action can each matter. Their adequacy depends on the need.
Listening matters and carries a responsibility
It would be a mistake to dismiss listening. In a study of 115 participants, Harry Weger and colleagues found that people receiving active-listening responses felt more understood than those receiving advice or simple acknowledgments. Active listening was a way of responding, not merely being physically present. [5]
That study measured people’s experience of a conversation. It did not establish that feeling understood resolves a financial loss, fulfills an agreement, or corrects a planning failure.
When someone is grieving, patient presence may be exactly the help they want. When someone needs an agreed payment explained or a preventable mistake corrected, listening should help establish the facts and the next action. Treating both situations the same misses what the other person is asking for.
When “I care” shifts attention from an unmet obligation to whether the speaker deserves credit for showing up, it functions as a deflection. The practical response is to return to the facts: what went wrong, who is responsible, and what will happen next.
A useful response in a business meeting might be: “I appreciate you listening. Let’s establish what happened, what remains unresolved, and who has authority to address it.” This lets concern support the conversation without replacing its purpose.
Time and money reveal priorities with context
Time and money are meaningful because they are limited. Planning carefully, checking a number, making a difficult call, funding a repair, or following through on an agreement can make concern visible. The relevant investment often happens before anyone complains.
Research at the University of Denver helps distinguish different reasons for investing in a relationship. In a study of 38 married couples, Scott Stanley and colleagues found that attitudes toward sacrifice predicted later marital adjustment and distress. The study examined attitudes and relationship outcomes; it did not define care by dollars spent. [6]
Galena Rhoades, Stanley, and Howard Markman studied 1,184 unmarried adults in relationships, distinguishing dedication from constraints such as material ties or feeling trapped. That distinction is useful here: having something invested does not, by itself, tell us why someone stays engaged. These findings concern romantic relationships, so applying them to business is an analogy. [7]
Mariko Visserman and colleagues likewise found, across four studies, that greater perceived partner responsiveness was associated with more favorable appraisals of sacrifice, including lower perceived costs and greater satisfaction. Their research combined experimental and observational methods. It supports a connection between feeling supported and the experience of sacrifice, not a rule that spending proves care. [8]
Being on company time does not disqualify someone from caring. A teacher can care while earning a salary. An employee can care while driving a company vehicle. Compensation tells us who pays for the work; it does not settle the worker’s motives or the quality of the work.
The stronger question is how the person uses the time, authority, and resources available to them. Do they prepare? Investigate an error? Explain their limits and involve the person who can decide? Attendance alone leaves those questions open.
Nor does care require ownership in your business or exposure to the same loss. A financial stake may align incentives, but someone can care about your welfare without one. Someone with a stake can act only to protect their own.
Capacity matters, too. A person with little money may give substantial help through attention, skill, or persistence. Large spending can coexist with neglect. Care should be judged in relation to the need and the person’s capacity, without an arbitrary dollar threshold or a demand for unlimited sacrifice.
Make room for care
Circumstances affect helping. In Darley and Batson’s 1973 experiment, 40 seminary students encountered a person apparently in distress while going to give a talk. Reported helping rates were 63 percent in the low-hurry condition, 45 percent in the intermediate condition, and 10 percent in the high-hurry condition. This small experiment illustrates the influence of time pressure; it does not identify who inwardly cared. [9]
My conclusion for leaders is practical: leave room for attention, preparation, and correction. A stated priority needs time in which to become action.
Amit Kumar and Nicholas Epley, of the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Chicago, studied random acts of kindness in laboratory and field experiments. Givers tended to underestimate how positively recipients would feel. Small acts can carry more warmth than the giver expects. This research concerns unexpected kindness, rather than performance of a business obligation. [10]
Responsibility includes competence and repair
A caring person can make a mistake. Outcomes also depend on conditions beyond anyone’s control. One failure does not prove indifference, and a good outcome does not prove good motives. More useful evidence comes from the pattern: preparation before a problem, conduct when it is discovered, and follow-through afterward.
Roger Mayer, James Davis, and David Schoorman’s organizational trust model distinguishes perceived ability, benevolence, and integrity. In plain terms: relevant competence, goodwill toward the other person, and adherence to principles that person finds acceptable. This is a theoretical framework, not an experiment or a care questionnaire. It helps explain why goodwill alone may be insufficient grounds for reliance. [11]
When someone accepts responsibility for a plan, accurate information and reasonable checks belong to that responsibility. If the task exceeds their competence or authority, an appropriate response is to say so and obtain qualified help.
Roy Lewicki, Beth Polin, and Robert Lount studied apologies with 755 participants across two studies. Acknowledging responsibility and offering repair were among the components participants valued most, with rankings varying by presentation. These studies measured responses to written apologies; they did not measure whether promised repairs were completed. [12]
An offer to fix something becomes stronger evidence when the work is done. In business, that may mean reconciling records, separating agreed facts from disputed ones, identifying the decision-maker, and recording a remedy or the remaining question. When an agreed payment is owed, making it fulfills an obligation. It should not be presented as a personal favor that ends legitimate questions.
Organizations also communicate care through how they operate. James Kurtessis and colleagues synthesized 558 studies of perceived organizational support: employees’ beliefs that their organization values their contribution and cares about their well-being. In the authors’ relative-importance analysis, fairness carried the largest weight, followed by supervisor support. The findings concern employees, rather than every kind of business relationship. [13]
For leaders, I draw a practical lesson: examine the procedures people experience. Clear responsibilities, accurate records, reasonable workloads, and a usable way to correct errors can make care dependable. Reassuring conversations cannot compensate indefinitely for a system that repeats avoidable harm.
How to judge the evidence of care
We rarely need a verdict on someone’s entire character. We need to decide whether their conduct supports reliance in the situation before us. These five questions are my practical synthesis, not a validated scale or a score for judging motives. These questions draw on research on understanding, sacrifice, responsibility, and repair, together with the trust model’s account of competence and integrity. [3] [6] [11] [12]
1. Do they understand the actual need? They can describe the problem accurately, check assumptions, and hear corrections without changing the subject.
2. Do they take appropriate responsibility? They identify their part, acknowledge limits, and involve someone with the necessary authority when needed.
3. Do they commit relevant effort or resources? Their attention, preparation, skill, money, or advocacy fits the problem and their capacity.
4. Do they act competently and follow through? They take reasonable precautions, keep specific commitments, and communicate promptly when circumstances change.
5. Do they respond to the effect on the other person? They check whether the help worked, respect the person’s agency, and adjust when it did not.
Repeated avoidance, vague promises, resistance to checking facts, and requests for credit before action are reasons to reduce reliance. They are evidence about conduct, not proof of a hidden motive. A precise conclusion is often stronger than an accusation: “I have not seen the action needed to rely on that assurance.”
Care also leaves room for disagreement and boundaries. Someone may care and refuse an unreasonable request or be unable to deliver the outcome you want. Honest limits, accompanied by appropriate effort, deserve to be distinguished from evasion.
The same standard belongs to us
The question of what care produces belongs to me as much as to the person across the table. When I say I care about my family, employees, or community, my choices should give them a reasonable basis to believe me.
Before my next assurance of care, I want to understand the actual need, name the responsibility I am accepting, and identify the action I will take. Then I need to follow through.
References
[1] Goetz, J. L., Keltner, D., & Simon-Thomas, E. (2010). Compassion: An evolutionary analysis and empirical review. Psychological Bulletin, 136(3), 351–374. doi:10.1037/a0018807. Full paper
[2] Reis, H. T., & Gable, S. L. (2015). Responsiveness. Current Opinion in Psychology, 1, 67–71. doi:10.1016/j.copsyc.2015.01.001. Publisher
[3] Crasta, D., Rogge, R. D., Maniaci, M. R., & Reis, H. T. (2021). Toward an optimized measure of perceived partner responsiveness: Development and validation of the Perceived Responsiveness and Insensitivity Scale. Psychological Assessment, 33(4), 338–355. doi:10.1037/pas0000986. Authors’ scale and citation
[4] Sinclair, S., McClement, S., Raffin-Bouchal, S., Hack, T. F., Hagen, N. A., McConnell, S., & Chochinov, H. M. (2016). Compassion in health care: An empirical model. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, 51(2), 193–203. doi:10.1016/j.jpainsymman.2015.10.009. Definition on p. 195; compassion–empathy distinction in Discussion, p. 201. Article
[5] Weger, H., Jr., Castle Bell, G., Minei, E. M., & Robinson, M. C. (2014). The relative effectiveness of active listening in initial interactions. International Journal of Listening, 28(1), 13–31. doi:10.1080/10904018.2013.813234. University research abstract
[6] Stanley, S. M., Whitton, S. W., Sadberry, S. L., Clements, M. L., & Markman, H. J. (2006). Sacrifice as a predictor of marital outcomes. Family Process, 45(3), 289–303. doi:10.1111/j.1545-5300.2006.00171.x. Publisher abstract
[7] Rhoades, G. K., Stanley, S. M., & Markman, H. J. (2010). Should I stay or should I go? Predicting dating relationship stability from four aspects of commitment. Journal of Family Psychology, 24(5), 543–550. doi:10.1037/a0021008. Full paper
[8] Visserman, M. L., Muise, A., Righetti, F., Horne, R. M., Le, B. M., Côté, S., & Impett, E. A. (2022). Lightening the load: Perceived partner responsiveness fosters more positive appraisals of relational sacrifices. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 123(4), 788–810. doi:10.1037/pspi0000384. Caring component in the section Perceived Partner Responsiveness, p. 2 of the advance-online paper. Full paper
[9] Darley, J. M., & Batson, C. D. (1973). From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27(1), 100–108. Helping percentages on pp. 104–105. Full paper
[10] Kumar, A., & Epley, N. (2023; online 2022). A little good goes an unexpectedly long way: Underestimating the positive impact of kindness on recipients. Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 152(1), 236–252. doi:10.1037/xge0001271. Publisher
[11] Mayer, R. C., Davis, J. H., & Schoorman, F. D. (1995). An integrative model of organizational trust. Academy of Management Review, 20(3), 709–734. doi:10.2307/258792. Journal record
[12] Lewicki, R. J., Polin, B., & Lount, R. B., Jr. (2016). An exploration of the structure of effective apologies. Negotiation and Conflict Management Research, 9(2), 177–196. doi:10.34891/9awp-8644. Samples and ratings in Tables 2 and 4. Journal article and full paper
[13] Kurtessis, J. N., Eisenberger, R., Ford, M. T., Buffardi, L. C., Stewart, K. A., & Adis, C. S. (2017). Perceived organizational support: A meta-analytic evaluation of organizational support theory. Journal of Management, 43(6), 1854–1884. doi:10.1177/0149206315575554. Relative-importance analysis in Table 6. Full paper